CSCI 157: UNIX Power Utilities and Shell Programming

Laboratory Assignment 15

ASSIGNMENT DUE: see calendar on the web

• Lab 15 is worth 20 points and is to be completed throughout the semester.
• Each student will present 4 things to everyone in lab.
• Each presentation is worth 5 points
  
• Each presentation will be around 5 minutes long.
• Each presentation should be done on a different day so that we get them spread out some
• We can make exceptions to this previous rule
• If someone wants to explain something really in-depth we can count it as more than one presentation (maybe), it has to really stand out though
• Depending on the presentation you can do it at the board or from your desk in lab, whatever...
  
• If it is a script or something you should make it world readable in your HOME directory or put it on the web, or both
  
• Presentations are to be informal
  
• The content of each presentation should be something interesting related to this course
• If you are newer to Unix just do a little research to find something you find interesting
• You can not cover the same thing or exact same material as what was covered by someone else.
• As long as you go for at least 5 minutes and are prepared you will get FULL credit
• Everyone in class will pay attention to your presentation or they will recieve a zero on this lab regardless if they have done presentations or not.
• Hopefully most presentations will be hands-on 'ish so we can try out what you show us.
• Examples include "introductions" or "cool" tricks for any of the following:
• sed
• with sed you can find one of those pages with handy one-liners, figure out the syntax and then show us the one liners and explain what each part does.
  
• awk
• perl
• Even just explaining some part of perl like
  
• regular expressions
  
• or how the implicit variable works
• or all the different ways you can compare and manipulate strings
• or how to write a really simple cgi
• or how to make an http request
• or file I/O
• or even console I/O
  
• regular expressions
• Features of the zsh that aren't found in other shells
• Useful Features in ksh, csh, tcsh, etc that are different in other shells
• csh is a great example
• I image most everyone in lab can not tell you how a for loop works in csh
• In next to no time at all you can be the csh control flow expert in lab [that was pep-talk]
  
• Why bash sucks and we should all really be using tcsh or ksh or ...?
• Using wget, basic usage, crawling a website with it, and other features
• Show the class a script you wrote outside of class to solve some problem
• vim
• customizations that we can't live without
• using multiple buffers for cutting and pasting
• features that help with C programming
  
• How to create vim or emacs macros, or functions or whatever and give examples of a useful one or two
• Give us the scoop on one of those "other" editors like joe, or nano
  
• Introduction to a scripting language such as tcl, expect, or python
• Examples
• Data types
• Control Structures
  
• SSH features, for example:
  
• demo/lead us through in class how we can all use a port forwarded through ssh to another machine as a proxy for our web browser
• how to use key authentication
• explain all of the different algorithm options, why use blowfish or 3DES or whatever
  
• find all of the SSH clients for windows you can (like PuTTY and whatever other ones there are) and give us a review on what features they have or which is the best, etc.
  
• Explain some random utility that nobody has heard of like jot and the cool things you can do with it
• Explain some common command that everyone has heard of and used like find but explain some of the more advanced features that few people know
• Write some small script utility and then explain why we all will want to use your utility and what we can use if for
  
• Resources
• Linux Gazette
• Any Linux magazine usually has some random interesting thing in it.
• Google
• Unix Power Tools (O'Reilly Publications) has fun stuff in it
• etc