Assignment 1

Due date: Thursday, September 17th at 11:55 pm.

Please note that all of the commands and techniques you need to solve this assignment were given in class. No internet searches should be necessary to complete this assignment. If you aren't sure where to start, review the class slides.

The purpose of this assignment is to practise your bash scripting skills on a data set. Before you begin, be sure to create a new directory to hold your assignment, and move into that directory:

[ejspence.mycomp]
[ejspence.mycomp] pwd
/c/Users/ejspence/MSC1090
[ejspence.mycomp]
[ejspence.mycomp] mkdir assignment1
[ejspence.mycomp]
[ejspence.mycomp] cd assignment1
[ejspence.mycomp]
[ejspence.mycomp] pwd
/c/Users/ejspence/MSC1090/assignment1
[ejspence.mycomp]


From within this directory, perform the following steps to download the data for this assignment.

The "curl" command downloads files from the internet. The "-O" flag tells curl to download the file without changing the name, and the "-L" flag tells curl to follow links.

The "tar" command unbundles a file which contains many other files. The "-x" flag tells tar to extract the file, "-z" indicates that the file has been gzipped (a type of compression), and the "-f" flag is used to indicate the file to apply the operation to.

This data represents the results of interviews of patients which have undergone auditory surgery. The data were collected by different graduate students, with the data from each student in a different directory. Once your data has been uncompressed, spend a little time examining the content of the directories, and the content of the files, so that you will understand what is being requested in the assignment.

1) Write a script called 'youngest.sh', which is to be run from the 'data' directory downloaded above. The script takes the name of one of the directories as an argument. The script is to determine and output the date of birth of the youngest entry in that directory. If there are multiple entries with the same youngest value, the first which is found should be output.

The script will be sourced from the command line, and should output similarly to below.

2) Write another script called 'countSats.sh', also to be run from the 'data' directory, and which also takes a directory name as an argument. This script should count and output the number of files which were reported on a Saturday.

Some points to consider:

• Full points will be awarded for implementations which store the number of files reported on Saturdays in a local variable, before printing the output.
• Similarly, full points will be awarded for solutions which use do not use "grep -c".
• Mac users may find that there is extra white space around the numbers in their output sentences. Do not worry about this white spaces, extra spaces within the sentences are not important.
• After the script is finished running you should be in the same directory you were in before the script was run, the data directory.
• The TAs will test your scripts by running them on their computers. DO NOT put anything into your script which will prevent it from being run on somebody else's computer.

Submit both ".sh" files which contain your code to the 'Assignment Dropbox'.

Assignments will be graded on 10 points basis.
Due date is September 17th 2020 (midnight), with 0.5 point penalty per day for late submission until the cut-off date of September 24, 2020.