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Midterm Exam
CSCI 2132: Software Development
February 4, 2019

Marks

Question 1 (6)

Question 2 (10)

Question 3 (6)

Question 4 (9)

Question 5 (9)

Question 6 (5)

Question 7 (5)

Total (50)

Instructions:

• Write your banner number and name at the top of this page before continuing to read.

• This exam has 10 pages, including this title page. Notify me immediately if your copy has
fewer than 10 pages.

• You are allowed to use one cheat sheet, letter paper, both sides, 10pt font or larger.

• Understanding the exam questions is part of the exam. Therefore, questions will not be inter-
preted. Proctors will only correct errors in question statements and clarify ambiguities, if any.

1
Question 1 (A little bit of everything) 6 marks

Mark all of the following statements that are true with a checkmark. No explanation is necessary.

(a) A given file (as identified by its inode) can exist in multiple directories. Ø

(b) A process is executable code stored in a file.

(c) For a process to be allowed to read a file with permissions -w-r----x (241), its real
group ID must match the file’s group.

(d) A soft link (symbolic link) can refer to directories and to files on a different file system
Ø
(a different disk).

(e) It is possible to start two processes from the shell so that what one process reads from
Ø
its stdin is whatever the other process writes to its stdout.

(f) Subversion is a distributed version control system.

Question 2 (Inodes, paths, file types, shells, and output redirection) 10 marks

(a) Consider a file file1 and a second file file2 created using the command ln file1 file2 .
Mark all of the following statements that are true with a checkmark:

Deleting file1 also deletes file2.

file1 and file2 refer to the same inode. Ø

Changing the contents of file1 also changes the contents of file2. Ø

file1 and file2 can have different permissions.

(b) Assume you execute the following commands with your current working directory being
/home/topstudent:

$ mkdir -p a/b/c a/b/d a/c b/d; cd a/b

Mark all of the following statements that are true after this sequence of commands with a check-
mark:
The directory ../.. is /home/topstudent. Ø

The directory .././d exists.

The directory ./c/../d exists. Ø

The directory /home/topstudent/b/d exists and is a subdirectory of
/home/topstudent.

2
(c) bash is a shell that can be used to interact with a Unix system. Mark all of the following statements
that are true with a checkmark:
bash is part of the Unix kernel.

bash can be used to start programs. Ø

bash can be used to automate tasks using scripts. Ø

bash is one of many shells available on Unix systems. Ø

(d) Which of the following are types of files that exist on a Unix system? Mark each with a checkmark.

Regular file Ø

Block device Ø

Network card

Directory Ø

(e) You are testing a new program prog you developed. Since you expect it to run for a while, you
plan to start it and then go for a coffee. You expect prog to produce a lot of normal output on
stdout and there is a good chance that there will be quite a few error messages sent to stderr.
In order to be able to inspect these when you come back, you want to capture stdout in a file
output and stderr in a file errors. Which of the following four commands achieves this:
./prog >> output 2> errors

./prog > output 2>&1 errors

./prog > output 2> errors Ø

./prog stdout=output stderr=errors

3
Question 3 (Users, groups, ownership, and file permissions) 6 marks

(a) Mark all of the following statements that hold for a file with permissions rwxr-x--x:

Everybody is allowed to execute the file. Ø

The file’s owner and every member of the file’s group can read the file. Ø

A process whose effective group ID matches the file’s owner can write the file.

Any member of the file’s group may change the file’s group.

(b) Mark all of the following statements that are true:

When running a program prog, the effective user ID of the resulting process is the
same as the owner of the file prog.

newgrp allows you to change your effective group to any group you want.

Every user has a unique user name and a unique user ID. Ø

Every user can be a member of only one group.

(c) You are a member of the group qateam and the owner of a program file prog. In order to ensure
that only the members of qateam are allowed to read and execute (but not write) the file prog
while not changing your own (the owner’s) access permissions, which of the following commands
do you use?

chown qateam prog; chmod g=rx,o= prog

chgrp qateam prog; chmod o= prog

chgrp qateam prog; chmod 750 prog

chgrp qateam prog; chmod g=rx,o= prog Ø

4
Question 4 (Wildcards and regular expressions) 9 marks

(a) Mark all of the following statements that are true:

Wildcards are a mechanism built into the shell to refer to all files whose names match
Ø
a given pattern.
grep is a tool that can be used to list all the lines of a text file that match a given
wildcard pattern.
Regular expressions are built into many text editors as a mechanism to search for
Ø
complex text patterns.
(b) Provide a command line that uses only ls and grep to list all files in the current directory whose
names consist of three letters (lowercase or uppercase) followed by an arbitrary number of digits
(zero digits is possible).

ls | grep -E -e '^[A-Za-z]{3}[0-9]*$'

(c) Provide a single wildcard expression expr so that ls expr lists the same files as in Question (b)
or explain briefly why such a wildcard expression expr does not exist.

This can’t be done because we need to check for an arbitrary number of digits. Wildcards only allow
us to check for a fixed number of digits or for an arbitrary number of characters (any characters).

(d) A palindrome is a word or number that is the same if read forward or backward (e.g., Otto, 1991,
racecar). Provide an extended regular expression that matches any palindrome with between 3
and 10 characters.

(.?)(.?)(.?)(.)(.)\5?\4\3\2\1

(e) Can the pattern in Question (d) be expressed using a basic regular expression? If so, provide such
a basic regular expression. Otherwise, explain why not.

Technically, yes, but the regular expression would have to be impractically large (albeit finite): You’d
have to specify all possible strings that are 3–10 letter palindromes.
So, the answer I was looking for was that this cannot be done using basic regular expressions because
they do not allow referencing back to an earlier part of the input that matches an earlier part of the
pattern, which is required to match palindromes.

5
Question 5 (Automating workflows in the shell) 9 marks

(a) Which of the following commands can be used to determine the size of the head command? Recall
that which cmd finds the program file that is executed when running the command cmd . Here,
it would print /bin/head or /usr/bin/head to stdout, depending on where head is installed
on the system.

which head | ls -l

ls < which head

ls -l ˋwhich headˋ Ø

echo ˋwhich head; ls -lˋ

(b) In scripts, we may not want to know which lines in a file match a given pattern; we only want
to know whether there exists a line in a given file that matches a given pattern. Which of the
following commands prints “0” (and nothing else) if and only if file contains a line that matches
the regular expression “a[0-9]+z”? (The -q option of grep supresses its output. grep has exit
code 0 if there is a match, and a non-zero exit code otherwise.)
echo ˋgrep ’a[0-9]+z’ fileˋ

grep -q ’a[0-9]+z’ file; echo $? Ø

grep ’a[0-9]+z’ file; echo $STATUS

fgrep -q ’a[0-9]+z’ file; echo $?

(c) Which of the following are valid bash control constructs? (There are two.)

for (i = 0; $i < 10; i = $i + 1); do echo $i; done

for f in *.txt; do cp $f $f.bak; done Ø

if [ -f ~/.config ]; then
prog ~/.config
else Ø
prog /etc/config.default
fi

case var in
1: echo "True"
*: echo "False"
esac

6
(d) Give a brief description of what the first correct control construct in Question (c) does.

The first construct is a loop that iterates over all files with extension .txt in the current directory.
For each such file file.txt, it creates a backup copy with name file.txt.bak.

(e) Give a brief description of what the second correct control construct in Question (c) does.

The second construct checks whether the file .config in my home directory exists. If so, it runs
prog with this config file as argument. Otherwise, it uses the system-wide default config file stored
in /etc/config.default.

7
Question 6 (Problem 1: Pipelines) 5 marks

You are given a database of employees of a company. The database is stored in a text file. Each line
of the text file stores information about one employee. The information stored for each employee is
Field 1: Last name
Field 2: First name
Field 3: Job title
Field 4: Department
Field 5: Salary
Field 6: Year when hired
The fields on each line are separated by commas, that is, the database is a CSV file. The first three
lines of such a file may look like this:

database.csv
Eaglewood,Bob,Technician,Tech Support,60000,2014
de Vos,Joanna,CEO,Management,20000000,1980
Lannigan,Jeffrey,Head of Sales,Sales,500000,1995
...

Write a one-line shell command using the commands cut, sort, and head that prints the last name
and job title of the 5 highest-paid employees of the company.
On the file above, the output would look like this (assuming all other employees represented by ...
earn less than $60,000/year).

de Vos,CEO
Lannigan,Head of Sales
Eaglewood,Technician
...

sort -t, -k5nr database.csv | cut -d, -f1,3 | head -5

8
Question 7 (Problem 2: Shell scripting) 5 marks

The diff command compares two files and, if they are text files, displays their differences. If at least
one file is a binary file, diff only displays the message Files ... and ... differ. If the two files
differ, the exit code of diff is 1; otherwise, it is 0.
In the space below, provide a shell script count_diffs.sh that meets the following specifications:

• The script checks that it is given exactly two command line arguments and that each is the name of a
directory. If these conditions are not met, it should print a message USAGE: count_diffs dir1 dir2
and exit.
• Given the two directories, it inspects all regular files in both directories and counts the number of
such files that
– Exist only in the first directory,
– Exist only in the second directory or
– Exist in both directories but differ.
• The only output the script should produce is a single number: the number of differing files that
were found. For example, if there is one file in the first directory that does not exist in the second
directory, two files in the second directory that do not exist in the first directory, and three files that
exist in both directories but whose contents differ, the output should be “6”.
Since diff prints at least the “Files . . . and . . . differ” message if two files are different, you need
to find a way to silence it. Output redirection is a good way to do this.

dir1=$1
dir2=$2
diffcount=0
for f in $dir1/*; do
if [[ -f $f ]]; then
name=`basename $f`
if [[ -f $dir2/$name ]]; then
diff $f $dir2/$name > /dev/null
(( diffcount = $diffcount + $? ))
else
(( diffcount = $diffcount + 1 ))
fi
fi
done
for f in $dir2/*; do
if [[ -f $f ]]; then
name=`basename $f`
if [[ ! -f $dir1/$name ]; then
(( diffcount = $diffcount + 1 ))
fi
fi
done
echo $diffcount

9
Extra space for Question 7

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