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Challenge questions

Now test yourself on the tutorial! Here are a few tasks to try out.

  1. Change directory to your home directory and create a new folder named 'challenges'. Then cd into it.

  2. Use echo and redirection to create a file called 'days_of_week.txt', listing the days of the week, one on each line. After each day, write down whether it's a weekday or weekend. Your file should look something like this:

Monday weekday
Tuesday weekday
(etc)
Saturday weekend
Sunday weekend

Note: remember you can use ↑ and ↓ to navigate back through your commands - this may make this much faster.

  1. Use less or cat to view the contents of the file and check they are correct. If not, use a text editor to fix any problems.

  2. Create a pipeline using cat and grep and cut, to print out just the names of the weekdays. Note If your file is space-separated, like the one above, you will need to use the -f ' ' argument to cut to tell it to use spaces instead of <tab> characters. Check the man page for cut more details.)

  3. Add to your pipeline a command to sort the weekdays in alphabetical order.

  4. Finally, add a tr command to your pipeline that changes 'a' to '@'.

Note

You should now should be looking at something like this:

Frid@y
Mond@y
Thursd@y
Tuesd@y
Wednesd@y

If so, well done! If not, look carefully back at your previous commands (for example using history) to see if you can spot what went wrong.

Congratulations! This is the end of the tutorial.