Unix Basics Quiz

Only use the command line to do all these tasks. Do not use an editor unless explicitly asked for.

Using the command line

1. What do these key combinations do in an interactive bash session?

  • CTRL-b, CTRL-f, CTRL-d, CTRL-t, ESC-b, ESC-f, ESC-d, CTRL-a, CTRL-e, CTRL-k, CTRL-y, CTRL-r, CTRL-n, CTRL-p?

2. How do you save a file and exit

  • an emacs session?
  • a vi session?

3. How cna you view the last 10 commands issued?

4. How do you find all commands that begin with gr?

Working with directories

5. How do you create

  • a new directory?
  • nested directories?

6. How do you remove

  • an empty directory?
  • a non-empty directory?
  • nested directories?

7. How do you navigate

  • to a new directory
  • back to your previous directory
  • to your home directory

8. How do you print your current directory?

Working with files

9. How do you create a new empty file?

10 How do you create the text “Hello world” in a new file called hello.txt.

11.. How do you append “Goodbye cruel world” to hello.txt.

12. Edit the hello.txt in emacs and delete the word cruel then save the file.

13. Edit hello.txt in vi and put the word creul back in its original position and save the file.

14. Copy the file hello.txt to goodbye.txt.

15. Combine the contents of hello.txt and goodbye.txt to a new file hello_goodbye.txt.

16. Move the files hello.txt, goodbye.txt and hello_goodbye.txt to a sub-directory called text.

17. Delete the file hello.txt in text.

18. Pipe lines 10-20 of EntryQuiz.ipynb to the wc command. What does the output of wc mean?

Compression, archival and checksums

19. Use gzip to compress the file hello_goodbye.txt. Report the size of the file in bytes before and after compression.

20. Use gunzip to uncompress and recover the file hello_goodbye.txt.

21. Create a file called MD5SUM of the MD5 checksums of the three text files in the directory. Keep MD5SUM in the parent directory of text - i.e. in the current directory.

22. Use tar to combine and compress all the filesi in the text directory into a file text.tar.gz.

23. Delete the text directory and all its contents recursively.

24. Use tar to recover the text directory from text.tar.gz.

25. Check that no files have been corrupted by the tar forward and backward processes.

Clean up

26. Delete all files and directories created in this session.