What Came Before

The following instructions assume that you have chosen a lab or a project to work on. You may have it done or may have simply read through the discussion and sample run/notes. Either way, you are ready to collect the requisite information together in a common place: the info file.

Let's Do THIS!

What's In There?

An info file needs to collect several pieces of information about the program:

What's It Look Like?

You can actually arrange the info file's information any way you like. However, several guiding samples are provided on the web site in these how-to pages (just the green bits — the orange are not necessary unless you are into that sort of detailed reporting) and in the 121 examples directories (especially under basics).

Putting It All Together

Ideally you'll put together the info file on your Unix account with your program. To create it, just do File|New and type up the content. Saving it is easy, too. The info file for 'hello.cpp' would most likely be saved as 'hello.info', for instance. Remember to cat this file first (right after the pwd) in your script!

Some people like to put the info file's content at the top of their main program as a block comment. This is a bad idea since we'll soon be writing programs that consist of 3 or more files. Typically in such a program, the main program file is cat last and so it may be several pages before the info 'file' is seen! Making it a separate file ensures that it can easily be cat first and not get hidden/lost in the script.