Test 1 Options

Level 1 – Master the Basics

Skill set for first 10 minute test:

• ssh into a server
• change directories to a given a file path (e.g. /lustre/isaac24/scratch/username)
• see the files in that folder and their sizes
• create a file, add content, and save
• print the first 15 lines of the file to the terminal, then print the last 15 lines of the file to the terminal
• sort the lines in the file and save the output to a new file
• find the unique lines in a file using sort and a pipe
• count the lines in the file
• rename the file
• copy the file
• delete the file
• make, rename, and delete a directory
• view all jobs you are running on a server
• Given a simple string (such as “AB” or “io”), get a list of all files with that string in their name
• Given a simple string (such as “AB” or “io”), get a list of all files with that string in their contents
• create and execute a bash script that runs a command
• redirect the output from a command to a file
• see what groups you are in
• explain the permissions on the files and folder
• change the permissions of the file – examples include allowing the owner to execute or allowing members of the group to read
• open the linux manual page for a command

Level 2 – Advanced

Still a 10-minute test but with this advanced skill set

• Grep
  • Search for lines with the pattern
  • Make the pattern case insensitive
  • Invert match – exclude lines with the pattern
  • Count matching lines
  • Count the total number of pattern matches across a file rather than just the number of matching lines
  • Show line numbers of matches
• Regular expressions
  • Line anchors to start and end of line
  • Fuzzy matching - zero or more (*), one or more (+), optional (?)
  • Character classes with brackets ([A-Za-z], [0-7] etc)
  • Use all these new techniques in grep
• Sort & Uniq OR Visidata
  • Sort lines alphabetically
  • Sort lines numerically
  • Sort by a specific column
  • Remove duplicate lines
  • Process a file with different delimiters (such as tab vs comma vs spaces)
  • Extract specific columns to a new file
  • Conditional filtering (more than, less than, equal to, and with regex)
• Sed
  • Substitute first match per line
  • Substitute all matches
  • Delete lines matching a pattern
  • Use find/replace regex
• Find
  • Find by filename or pattern
  • Find by name and type
  • Execute a command on each results
• Diff
  • Run and understand diff output for two files

Level 3 – Choose Your Own Adventure

Pick a Linux command line-based skill you want to master. Learn it, develop an approximately 35-minute lab (written github wiki instructions and video that teaches the skill to others), develop a 10 question in person test, which I will have you do during test 1. Good options include some of those above - regular expressions, grep, awk, sed – but you’ll need to go more in depth than Level 2 for credit. I absolutely love vim for editing files. Zane loves visidata and highly recommends that. Bioawk is also very useful. Run any other suggestions past me.