For this and all future assignments, please make sure you are using Bash as
your shell, as that’s what this course will focus on for the reasons described
in lecture. You may already be using Bash, or
you may be using another shell such as Zsh. For coursework, we recommend either
running bash -l each time you do coursework or changing your shell with
chsh until the term is over.
Many software engineers use the command line in their day-to-day lives. The whole “command-line experience” is composed of a bunch of programs, working together, to help you solve problems.
Since we’re going to be using the command line frequently in this course, developing muscle memory is going to be important. Building an intuition for what commands to use when will come in handy.
To get started, you’re going to poke around the homework server using the tools
we discussed in lecture. You’ll get some hands-on experience with pwd, cd,
ls, cat, tree, and man. Please answer the following questions and “show
your work” (see Grading on the syllabus for an
example) with each:
/comp/50ISDT/, while in your home directory.
Remember that relative paths cannot start with a slash./comp/50ISDT/. Take a look around! What’s the password?cat number each line in a file? (Answer this question
without referencing the internet, please!)/dev/ are used to communicate with the
Linux kernel. Choose a file that looks interesting inside /dev/ and tell
us what it’s for. Please don’t choose /dev/null, as we will discuss that
in lecture. You are free to use Google or any other internet or printed
resource, but cite your source./etc/ is a standard directory on Linux that contains system configuration
files. Although file extensions (like .txt and .jpg) have no intrinsic
meaning on Linux, many configuration files in /etc/ have them anyway.
Write a shell pipeline that prints the top ten most frequently occurring
extensions of files inside /etc/, taking the “extension” to be the part of
a file’s name that occurs after the final . character. Your count should
include files in subdirectories, except those you don’t have permission to
see. Your count should not include the names of subdirectories themselves.
(e.g. /etc/sysctl.d/ should not count as a .d extension.) You may
include or omit files that have no extension from the count at your
discretion.
Your output should contain ten lines (unless there are fewer than ten unique
extensions inside /etc/). Each line should include the extension (with or
without the dot, at your discretion) and a count of files with that
extension. We do not care about whitespace, field order, or whether each
line includes extra fields beyond these two.
Hint: \.[^/.]*$ is a regular expression that matches a literal dot
(.), followed by any number of characters that are not a dot or a forward
slash, followed by the end of a line. In other words, it matches the
extension of files from line(s) containing file paths.
This is not a trivial problem. Expect to have several different commands in your pipeline. Please ask for help early if you are struggling.
/comp/50ISDT/!There was a murder last night at your old university colleague David’s dinner
party! A guest found a body in the living room, and nobody knows who did it.
You, the premiere private investigator in Medford, MA, have been called in to
help. Explore David’s magnificent mansion (represented conveniently by a
directory tree in /comp/50ISDT/cli1-murder-mystery/) to see what you can
find! Start your journey in the entryway.
Please provide the name of the murderer (and an outline of your investigation) as your answer.
Write your answers in a text file, answers.txt. It should be split into two
sections (CaLIsthenics and mystery), and numbered where appropriate. Submit
this file on Gradescope.