Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

4Command-Line Programs

Much of the power that Unix brings to the user is in the command-line tools, where the user can set up pipelines of independent programs that manipulate data. It’s time to take a peek under the hood of a typical command-line tool and see how it works, as many of the command-line concepts (processing arguments, checking the environment) apply to any Unix program. Here you are going to write a program that filters its input by changing any letters it finds to upper or lower case.

Figure 4.1 shows a typical command-line program along with its three communication streams. The standard-in stream (also called “stdin”) supplies data to the program. The data you are to process comes from standard-in. You are done once the stream ...