💻 MOSS Plagiarism Checker CLI

`mossgo`: A CLI Tool for Stanford MOSS plagiarism tool made in GoLang

---

Contents

• Introduction
• Registering for MOSS
• Commands
  • Language
  • Directory
  • BaseFile
  • Max Similarities
  • Comment
  • Number of Files to Match
  • Experimental Mode
• Installation Instructions
• Build from Source

Introduction

This is a CLI client for the MOSS plagiarism tool, written in Go. Moss (for a Measure Of Software Similarity) is an automatic system for determining the similarity of programs. Moss is being provided as an Internet service, which is called upon through this client CLI.

In response to a query the Moss server produces HTML pages listing pairs of programs with similar code. Moss also highlights individual passages in programs that appear the same, making it easy to quickly compare the files. Finally, Moss can automatically eliminate matches to code that one expects to be shared (e.g., libraries or instructor-supplied code), thereby eliminating false positives that arise from legitimate sharing of code. The CLI returns the URL to this result on a review.

Please click here for more information on MOSS.

Registering for MOSS

To obtain a Moss account, send a mail message to moss@moss.stanford.edu. The body of the message should appear exactly as follows:

registeruser
mail username@domain

You will receive an automated response after a while, which contains the Perl client script to run MOSS. In between the code you will find your unique ID written as such: $userid=987654321; Copy this user ID and use it to login to the CLI.

Commands

Help

To see details of all available commands

mossgo <COMMAND> help

Login

To save the MOSS user ID as creds in a local file.

mossgo login

Review

Usage:

moss [-l|--language language] [-d|--directory] [-b|--basefile basefile1] ... [-b|--basefile basefileN] [-m 10] [-x|--experimental] [-n|--show 250] [-c "string"] file1 file2 file3 ...

If you haven't logged in, the CLI will ask you to enter your user ID.

Language

The -l|--language option specifies the source language of the tested programs. Moss supports many different languages; see below for the full list.

• c
• cc
• java
• ml
• pascal
• ada
• lisp
• scheme
• haskell
• fortran
• ascii
• vhdl
• perl
• matlab
• python
• mips
• prolog
• spice
• vb
• csharp
• modula2
• a8086
• javascript
• plsql
• verilog Example: Compare the lisp programs foo.lisp and bar.lisp:

moss -l lisp foo.lisp bar.lisp

Directory

The -d|--directory option specifies that submissions are by directory, not by file. That is, files in a directory are taken to be part of the same program, and reported matches are organized accordingly by directory.

Example: Compare the programs foo and bar, which consist of .c and .h files in the directories foo and bar respectively.

moss -d foo/*.c foo/*.h bar/*.c bar/*.h

Example: Each program consists of the *.c and *.h files in a directory under the directory "assignment1."

moss -d assignment1/*/*.h assignment1/*/*.c

Basefile

The -b option names a "base file". When a base file is supplied, program code that also appears in the base file is not counted in matches. A typical base file will include, for example, the instructor-supplied source code
IMPORTANT: Unlike previous versions of moss, the -b option always takes a single filename, even if the -d option is also used.

Example: Submit all of the C++ files in the current directory, using skeleton.cc as the base file:

moss -l cc -b skeleton.cc *.cc

Example: Submit all of the ML programs in directories asn1.96/* and asn1.97/*, where asn1.97/instructor/example.ml and asn1.96/instructor/example.ml contain the base files.

moss -l ml -b asn1.97/instructor/example.ml -b asn1.96/instructor/example.ml -d asn1.97/*/*.ml asn1.96/*/*.ml

Max Similarities

The -m|--maxSimilarities option sets the maximum number of times a given passage may appear before it is ignored. A passage of code that appears in many programs is probably legitimate sharing and not the result of plagiarism. With -m N, any passage appearing in more than N programs is treated as if it appeared in a base file (i.e., it is never reported). The default for -m is 10. Examples:

moss -l pascal -m 2 *.pascal

moss -l cc -m 1000000 -b mycode.cc asn1/*.cc

Comment

The -c option supplies a comment string that is attached to the generated report. Example:

moss -l scheme -c "Scheme programs" *.sch 

Number of Files to match

The -n option determines the number of matching files to show in the results. The default is 250. Example:

moss -c java -n 200 *.java

Experimental Mode

The -x option sends queries to the current experimental version of the server. Example:

moss -x -l ml *.ml

Installation Instructions

Download the binary from releases

• Download the executable for your platform
• Add the path to your executable to the PATH variable
• Execeute mossgo from your commanf line.

Build from Source

Pre-requisites

Go

Steps

• Clone the repository on your system

git clone https://github.com/ishitb/moss.go.git

or using SSH

git clone git@github.com:ishitb/moss.go.git

Using executable

• Build an executable for your system

go build -o bin/

• Run the executable from the directory you cloned the repository in

./bin/mossgo

Edit and Run the CLI

go run main.go

---

Made by

with ☕ and ❤️.