Sorry for probably the seemingly dumb question, but I am rather confused on what my professor is asking, or how to test if I got the right answer. I have searched for similar questions but nothing seems to exactly relate. Here's the question
create a new file called program2.scr.
Change the permissions on this new file to add the execute bit for user, group, and owner.
Edit your new file using Gedit, VIM or VI and change it so it performs the following actions:
· Using a line after #!/bin/bash, take the output of the ps –e command and pipe it to the sort command.
· After it has been piped to the sort command, redirect that output to a file called psfile.
So far my code is this:
#!/bin/bash
ps -e | sort > psfile
Is this all I need to do? Is it right? How to I test for the right output?
Related
I'm teaching an introductory Linux course and have abandoned the paper-based multiple-choice quizzes and have created interactive quizzes in Bash. My quiz script is functional, but kind of quick-and-dirty, and now I'm in the improvement phase and looking for suggestions.
First off, I'm not looking to automate the grading, which certainly simplifies things.
Currently, I have a different script file for each quiz, and the questions are hard-coded. That's obviously terrible, so I created a .txt file holding the questions, delimited by lines with "question 01" etc. I can loop through and use sed -n "/^quest.*$i\$/,/^quest.*$(($i+1))\$/p", but this prints the delimiter lines. I can pipe through sed "/^q/d" or head -n-1|tail -n+2 to get rid of them, but is there a better way?
Second issue: For questions where the answer is an actual command, I'm printing a [user]$ prompt, but for short-answer, I'm using a >. In my text file, for each question, the last line is the prompt to use. Initially, I was thinking I could store the question in a variable and |tail -1 it to get the prompt, but duh, when you store it it strips newlines. I want the cursor to immediately follow the prompt, so I either need to pass it to read -p or strip the final newline from the output. (Or create some marker in the file to differentiate between the $ and > prompt.) One thought I had was to store each question in a separate file and just cat it to display it, making sure there was no newline at the end. That might be kind of a pain to maintain, but it would solve both problems. Thoughts?
Now to how I'm actually running the quiz. This is a Fedora 20 box, and I tried copying bash and setuid-ing it to me so that it would be able to read the quiz script that the students couldn't normally read, but I couldn't get that to work. After some trial and error, I ended up copying touch and setuid-ing it to me, then using that to create their answer file in a "submit" directory with an ACL so new files have o=w so they can write to their answer file (in the quiz with >> echo) but not read it back or access the directory. The only major loophole I see with this is that they can delete their file by name and start the quiz over with no record of having done so. Since I'm not doing any automatic grading, I'm not terribly concerned with the students being able to read the script file, although if I'm storing the questions separately, I suppose I could make a copy of cat and setuid it to read in files that they can't access.
Also, I realize that Bash is not the best choice for this, and learning the required simple input/output for Python or something better would not take much effort. Perhaps that's my next step.
1) You could use
sed -n "/^quest.*$i\$/,/^quest.*$(($i+1))\$/ { //!p }"
Here // repeats the last attempted pattern, which is the opening pattern in the first line of the range and the closing pattern for the rest.
...by the way, if you really want to do this with sed, you better be damn sure that i is a number, or you'll run into code injection problems.
2) You can store multiline command output in a variable without problems. You just have to make sure you quote the variable everafter to avoid shell expansion on it. For example,
QUESTION=$(sed -n "/^quest.*$i\$/,/^quest.*$(($i+1))\$/ { //!p }" questions.txt)
echo -n "$QUESTION" # <-- the double quotes are important here.
The -n option to echo tells echo to not append a newline at the end, which should take care of your prompt problem.
3) Yes, well, hackery breeds more hackery. If you want to lock this down, the first order of business would be to not give students a shell on the test machine. You could put your script behind inetd and have the students fill it out with telnet or something, I suppose, but...really, why bash? If it were me, I'd knock something together with a web server and one of the several gazillion php web quiz frameworks. Although I also have to wonder why it's a problem if students can see the questions and the answers they gave. It's not like all students use the same account and can see each other's answers, is it? (is it?) Don't store an answer key on the same machine and you shouldn't have a problem.
so, I'm solid on linux basics, and have never written a shell script. But there is something I would like to get, or do.
Would it be possible to have linux log ALL COMMANDS I EVER TYPE in a single file? I.e., every ls -l and cd /this/folder etc., but also the install records I have done and more.
If this file exists great. If there is a persistent file created for EACH session and user, then maybe I can write a script to conjoin the lines. Or, what other options are available?
I'd like the file to have 3 columns, user executing, datetime executed, and copy of the command string. Some kind of results or error if returned would be great. MANY THANKS from a guy who is amazed what Linux is capable of doing!
Assuming you're running bash, look at your ~/.bash_history file.
We have application which is written in Python in linux enviromet which is legacy code.I have task to document which help other in wiki page. I thought, Can I add one file into Existing code. So I can add documentation into another File. So if user open file it will pop us with code detail. if user does not want to see that file they can close this File. for Example
sample.py ( A File which contain code)
demo.txt ( which contain documentation file)
So if I open sample.py using vi like vi sample.py than demo.txt open by default like pop us or simple way which contain documentation part. I think it is like windows tool when we open tool it pop us infront of user. it is my idea I am not sure really it is valid or not. I have searched but could not find any useful information.
What you want to do will most likely confuse the user. If one types vi sample.py one expects to read this file. Now what you can do as #HAL said in his comment is add a comment in your code saying that the documentation for this code is in the demo.txt accessible at /path/to/demo.txt.
I think this is the common way to do it, and you will probably frustrate the user if you don't do it this way. (at least I would be ;) )
I am not aware of any Linux specific include functionality and I do not think that it exists, because the program you are executing is vi and not the Linux kernel. But editors support editor specific functions for hyper links. Here is an example for vim. vim: Add clickable label
Another way would be to replace vi with a shell script which does what you want. This is an example:
#! /bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "sample.py" ] ; then
vim demo.txt "$1"
fi
This will open the documentation together with the program in two vim buffers.
Problem
I'm writing a set of scripts to help with automated batch job execution on a cluster.
The specific thing I have is a $OUTPUT_DIR, and an arbitrary $COMMAND.
I would like to execute the $COMMAND such that its output ends up in $OUTPUT_DIR.
For example, if COMMAND='cp ./foo ./bar; mv ./bar ./baz', I would like to run it such that the end result is equivalent to cp ./foo ./$OUTPUT_DIR/baz.
Ideally, the solution would look something like eval PWD="./$OUTPUT_DIR" $COMMAND, but that doesn't work.
Known solutions
[And their problems]
Editing $COMMAND: In most cases the command will be a script, or a compiled C or FORTRAN executable. Changing the internals of these isn't an option.
unionfs, aufs, etc.: While this is basically perfect, users running this won't have root, and causing thousands+ of arbitrary mounts seems like a questionable choice.
copying/ hard/soft links: This might be the solution I will have to use: some variety of actually duplicating the entire content of ./ into ./$OUTPUT_DIR
cd $OUTPUT_DIR; ../$COMMAND : Fails if $COMMAND ever reads files
pipes : only works if $COMMAND doesn't directly work with files; which it usually does
Is there another solution that I'm missing, or is this request actually impossible?
[EDIT:]Chosen Solution
I'm going to go with something where each object in the directory is symbolic-linked into the output directory, and the command is then run from there.
This has the downside of creating a lot of symbolic links, but it shouldn't be too bad.
You can't solve this without making some assumptions about the interface of $COMMAND. There is no single definition of what "output ends up in $OUTPUT_DIR" means. For one program this may be some files, but another program might just print something to stdout and yet another might try sending some data over the internet using some protocol or display something in a GUI and there isn't an obvious way of mapping all of these to "output goes to $OUTPUT_DIR".
So, you need to invent some assumptions and require any $COMMAND implementation to follow them. Then, it may get as simple as requesting that the command accept a parameter such as --target=<DIR>. If your command was some simple command, you would have to create a wrapper script around it to translate that parameter into what the app accepts. cp, mv and a few more utils already accept the parameter --target, so that may be a good starting point.
You cannot set the output directory, you can only set the working directory.
The problem is, once you set the working directory, other references are going to be invalid. For example in your code foo:
cp ./foo ./bar
If you have a specific command, there are workarounds (creating a script that alters arguments, prepending the directory to specific arguments), but in general this is not possible.
We have a shell script that expects multiple user inputs to be entered when prompted. e.g
At first it may ask for the operation to be performed. When that answer is given, it may ask for username then password etc. We want to automate this task by providing the inputs using file redirection i.e.
script < input.
The input file will have all the answers for different questions that the script may ask. However it is not working and the shell script is reading only the first line of the input file. What do I need to change or use to make this work?
What you can use is the program expect. You create a script for it that tells it when to give what input to some command it executes. This way you can automate exactly the kind of thing you're struggling with.
More info on Google and here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3065
man page: http://linux.die.net/man/1/expect
You say 'it only reads the first line of input.'
So you have to kill the script?
Is there any output? (error messages especially)?
Are you redirecting STDERR to /dev/null or else where? If so, remove that.
Here is the hightest probability helper ... Modify the top-level script and add set -vx at the 2nd line. Then you'll be able to see what was processed, where it has stopped and possibly formulate theories about why it is not processing data.
Any chance that the input file was created in a Windows environment and the cr\lf pair is messing up the expected input?
I hope this helps.
Thanks all for commenting and answering. I tried except and that did not work. So I am going to mention what worked for us. Here was our workflow - 1. At the linux prompt, type the command, it was connect() in our case. 2. Once that command is given, the script would ask for parameters for the command like port number, server etc. we had to provide that manually 3. Then we again are presented with a shell prompt with another input. In our case, we were able to provide the first command connect() at the prompt using file redirection, but the parameter passing was an issue. The solution we found was provide the parameters inside the parentheses of connect only i.e. our input file for redirection would contain - connect(). This worked for us.