Homework 01: Command Line Adventure

The goal of this homework assignment is to allow you to practice manipulating files, redirecting I/O, constructing pipelines, and signaling processes in a Unix environment.

For this assignment, you are to do your work in the homework01 folder of your assignments GitHub repository and push your work by noon Saturday, January 28.

Activity 0: Branching¶

As discussed in class, each reading and homework assignment must be completed in its own git branch; this will allow you to separate the work of each assignment and for you to use the Pull Request workflow describe in Reading 01.

To create a homework01 branch in your local repository, follow the instructions below:

$ cd path/to/cse-20289-sp23-assignments   # Go to assignments repository

$ git checkout master                     # Make sure we are in master branch

$ git pull --rebase                       # Make sure we are up-to-date with GitHub

$ git checkout -b homework01              # Create homework01 branch and check it out

$ cd homework01                           # Go into homework01 folder

Once these commands have been successfully performed, you are now ready to add, commit, and push any work required for this assignment.

Activity 1: Adventure Guide (9 Points)¶

The main activity for this assignment is to follow the prompts of your Adventure Guide, which takes the form of a program located at:

https://www3.nd.edu/~pbui/teaching/cse.20289.sp23/static/txt/GUIDE

You can use either curl or wget to download this program to your homework01 folder in your assignments repository and execute it as follows:

# Go to homework01 directory in assignments repository
$ cd path/to/assignments/homework01

# Download Adventure GUIDE
$ wget https://www3.nd.edu/~pbui/teaching/cse.20289.sp23/static/txt/GUIDE

# Run Adventure GUIDE
$ python3 GUIDE
...

As you can see in the demonstration video below, the GUIDE script will prompt you to complete a series of tasks (19 in total). After you complete each task, you must run the GUIDE script so it can verify your work. If it detects that you have completed the task, it will update the tasks.yaml file with a specially encoded checkpoint payload associated with your netid and the corresponding task. It will then prompt you with the next task.

You are to follow the prompts specified by the GUIDE until you have completed each of the tasks in the adventure. Because some tasks depend on others, there is no skipping ahead or going backwards. That said, you can always remove the checkpoints in the tasks.yaml file to go back to a particular task.

At the end of this activity, you should see the following output from the GUIDE:

$ ./GUIDE
Checking homework01 tasks ...
 Task 00 Checkout on homework01 branch            ... Completed
 Task 01 Make GUIDE executable                    ... Completed
 Task 02 Copy file                                ... Completed
 Task 03 Extract archive                          ... Completed
 Task 04 Rename directory                         ... Completed
 Task 05 Remove archive                           ... Completed
 Task 06 Create empty file                        ... Completed
 Task 07 Redirection                              ... Completed
 Task 08 Append to file                           ... Completed
 Task 09 Edit file                                ... Completed
 Task 10 File size                                ... Completed
 Task 11 Disk usage                               ... Completed
 Task 12 Search file contents                     ... Completed
 Task 13 Search file names                        ... Completed
 Task 14 Sorting                                  ... Completed
 Task 15 Symlink                                  ... Completed
 Task 16 PID                                      ... Completed
 Task 17 Kill                                     ... Completed
 Task 18 Quiz                                     ... Completed
   Score 10.00 / 10.00
  Status Success

Adventure Companions¶

The following information will help you on your journey:

References¶

If you need additional reference information, please refer to the readings from Reading 01:

1. The Linux Command Line:

   • Chapter 6 - Redirection
   • Chapter 7 - Seeing the World as the Shell Sees it
   • Chapter 8 - Advanced Keyboard Tricks
   • Chapter 9 - Permissions

   • Chapter 10 - Processes

   You may also wish to read the following chapters:

   • Chapter 17 - Searching For Files

   • Chapter 18 - Archiving And Backup

Activity 2: Adventure Quiz (1 Point)¶

Once you have completed all the tasks specified by the GUIDE in Activity 1, you are to complete the following reflection quiz:

As with Reading 01, you will need to store your answers in a homework01/answers.json file. You can use the form above to generate the contents of this file, or you can write the JSON by hand.

To check your quiz directly, you can use the check.py script:

$ ../.scripts/check.py
Checking homework01 quiz ...
     Q01 0.20
     Q02 0.20
     Q03 0.20
     Q04 0.20
     Q05 0.20
   Score 1.00 / 1.00
  Status Success

Guru Point (1 Extra Credit Point)¶

For extra credit, read the following chapters from The Linux Command Line:

1. Chapter 11 - The Environment
2. Chapter 13 - Customizing the Prompt

Once you have read these chapters, you are to customize your bash shell prompt by adding useful information and colors and setting $EDITOR to your preferred text editor.

Here are some additional resources to help you customize your bash shell:

1. How to Customize your Bash Prompt on a Linux VPS

2. Bash/Prompt customization

3. How to Customize (and Colorize) Your Bash Prompt

4. EZPrompt: Easy Bash PS1 Generator

5. In Unix, how do I set my default (preferred) editor?

Submission¶

To submit your assignment, please commit your work to the homework01 folder of your homework01 branch in your assignments GitHub repository:

$ cd path/to/cse-20289-sp23-assignments               # Go to assignments repository
$ git checkout master                                 # Make sure we are in master branch
$ git pull --rebase                                   # Make sure we are up-to-date with GitHub
$ git checkout -b homework01                          # Create homework01 branch and check it out
$ cd homework01                                       # Go to homework01 directory
...

$ git add Makefile                                    # Mark changes for commit
$ git add GUIDE                                       # Mark changes for commit
$ git add tasks.yaml                                  # Mark changes for commit
$ git commit -m "Homework 01: Activity 1 completed"   # Record changes
...

$ git add answers.json                                # Mark changes for commit
$ git commit -m "Homework 01: Activity 2 completed"   # Record changes
...

$ git push -u origin homework01                       # Push branch to GitHub