MN404 - T1 2018: Operating Systems and Command Line Interface (CLI)

This assignment solution delves into the fundamental aspects of operating systems, focusing on their crucial role in managing computer hardware and providing a platform for software execution. It covers essential OS services such as program execution, resource allocation, protection, error ha...Read More

Running head: LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM
Linux Operating System
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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Table of Contents
Section 1.....................................................................................................................................2
Answer 1:...............................................................................................................................2
Answer 2:...............................................................................................................................3
Answer 3:...............................................................................................................................4
Answer 4:...............................................................................................................................4
Section 2.....................................................................................................................................5
Question 1:.............................................................................................................................5
Question 2:.............................................................................................................................6
Question 3..............................................................................................................................7

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Section 1
Answer 1:
The five most vital services of the Operating System are:
1. Program Execution: The Operating System helps the users and the user-level
applications, with a platform to perform several operations and tasks. The OS
translates and executes the programs and data in a meaningful way by utilizing every
possible resources.
2. Resource allocation: Resource allocation is one of the most important tasks of the
Operating System. Through this process, the OS assigns and manages computational
assets in such a manner, which supports a program or process’s requirement or
performance goals. It includes utilizing the processor resources and other tangible
properties to provide the application software with a hasty and comfortable working
environment.
3. Protection: For computer systems with more than one users and concurrent execution
of multiple or multi-level processes, it is necessary for these processes to be
abstracted from the activities of each other [5].
4. Error Detection and Handling: Errors or Exceptions can occur at any time during the
session of an OS or during the execution of a process. Errors may occur in the CPU,
in memory devices or in the I/O devices. The major activities of the OS in error
handling are as follows:
 The OS keeps constant track of error occurrences at real time.
 The OS takes all needed actions to handle these errors to protect its ongoing
processes from crashing [1].

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5. File system manipulation: A file is a collection of related data and information.
Computers can store files on the disk (secondary storage), for long-term storage
purpose. The activities of the OS in the prospect of file management are as follows:
 Provides assistance to programs that need to read from or write to files.
 The OS gives required permission to the processes for file operations.
 These permission may vary from read-only, read-write, denied and more.
 The operating system provides the interface to its user or the programs, in order to
create, update or delete files.
The user-level application software packages are not eligible to perform the variety of
core tasks that an Operating System is entitled to. These software programs are required to
take the permission from the OS in order to commit any core level operations like achieving
resource or memory/file handling.
Answer 2:
Windows and Linux are considered as quite similar in some cases. This is because
both of them provide a Graphical User Interface in addition to the Command Line Interface
to perform every low level tasks on the Operating system. It is common for both the
Operating Systems to provide a native web browsing software of their own. Moreover, both
Windows and Linux assist their users with the multiprocessing architecture to perform tasks
faster by supporting concurrency, time-sharing, resource allocation, memory-management
and so on.
However, Linux is better proclaimed for its command line interface. It is known as the
Linux shell. The Linux shell provides a wide range of commands to perform operations on
the system, when compared to the Windows command line (DOS). The Linux OS offers the
users with a three-level security abstraction. The user layer can be accessed to perform basic

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operations on the Home directory whereas the Root access user can retrieve restricted files,
add new, delete them or install software packages. The service accounts from Apache, Squid
and so on helps to enhance the security based on the services. Linux is also considered to be
as more secured, robust and scalable when compared to the Windows OS [4].
Nevertheless, Windows is more preferable when it comes to working with the GUI.
The Windows GUI offers better operations and accessibility feature compared to Linux [3].
In addition, Windows allows the users to install and use a vast ocean of software products,
which may be otherwise not runnable on Linux.
Answer 3:
Multiprocessor Operating System can be defined as the use of two or more CPU
(Central Processing Units) for operations on a single computer system. These multiple CPUs
constantly translocate information internally. They share the computer bus, the memory
resources and the peripheral devices. These systems are also known as tightly coupled
systems. These kind of systems help in very high speed processing or in situations where
large volume of data is needed to be operated upon.
Answer 4:
The capacity of any Operating System to accumulate information and program parts
together in a single module is defined as branch processing. The Operating System
categorizes the processes having predefined program sequences alongside data modules as
one consolidated unit and these are then stored in the physical memory drives like hard
drives, tapes and so on. The processor on the First-Come-First-Serve concept takes up these
tasks. This procedure is acclaimed to increase the processing speed of several large data set
processes as the manual data segregation can be avoided.

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Section 2
Question 1:

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Question 2:

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Question 3

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References
[1] Silberschatz, Abraham, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne. Operating system concepts
essentials. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014.
[2] Peter, Simon, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan RK Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Thomas Anderson, and Timothy Roscoe. "Arrakis: The operating system is the control
plane." ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 33, no. 4 (2016): 11.
[3] Lee, Sang-Hyuk, and Seung-Hyun Oh. "A kinect sensor based windows control
interface,”." International Journal of Control and Automation 7, no. 3 (2014): 113-124.
[4] Wolf, Marilyn. High-performance embedded computing: applications in cyber-physical
systems and mobile computing. Newnes, 2014.
[5] Uitto, Joni, Sampsa Rauti, Jari-Matti Mäkelä, and Ville Leppänen. "Preventing malicious
attacks by diversifying Linux shell commands." In SPLST, pp. 206-220. 2015.