Lab 6 - Working With Wildcards

A Brief description of the wildcards.

wildcards

Cheat Sheet here

Video here

Note: Wildcards are all about pattern matching. They can be confusing but once you get a hold of them, you will never forget them. The table above gives you a summary of each wildcard. The goal of this lab is to give you enough practice for you to master wildcards in their basics form. Wildcards are very powerful because they can be combined to match pretty much any pattern that you can think of.

IMPORTANT!!! READ ME!!!!!

Before working on this lab, run this command:
curl https://cis106.com/assets/lab6.sh | bash
This will create a directory called lab6 in your home directory

Question 1 | Using the * Wildcard

In your home directory, you should have a directory called lab6, if you don’t have it, make sure to run the curl command in the READ ME part of this lab.
List all the log files located in the lab6 directory.

Create a directory called log-files inside the lab6 directory. Move all the log files to the log-files directory.

List all the configuration files in the etc directory. (Configuration files have the extension of .conf)
Long list all the configuration files in the etc directory that start with letter h or letter p sorted by file size. Modify the ls command with the proper options so that the output looks like this: (Notice the date)
-rw-r--r-- 1 7.5K 08/19/21 /etc/pnm2ppa.conf
You can see a full list of control characters for the date here

Take a screenshot of your terminal showing all the commands that you used to complete this question.

Question 2 | Using the ? wildcard

List only the hidden files inside the lab6 directory.
List all the files with a 2 letter file extension in the lab6 directory
Inside the lab6 directory, list all the files that start with letter l, have one character after letter l, and the letters st. The the rest of the file name is irrelevant.
Inside the lab6 directory, list all the files that have an _ and two characters before the file extension.

Take a screenshot of your terminal showing all the commands that you used to complete this question.

Question 3 | Using the [] Wildcard

List all the files that start with an uppercase letter
List all the files that start with an uppercase letter or a number
List all the files that have a number in the file name
List all the files that start with a lowercase letter and have a number before the file extension.

Take a screenshot of your terminal showing all the commands that you used to complete this question.

Question 4 | Using brace expansion.

The curly braces are not a wildcard but they are equally useful. The curly braces allow you to generate arbitrary strings to use with commands.

Problem 1:
In the lab6 directory, create the following directory structure. Display a tree of the directory. Take a screenshot:

wallpapers/
└── cars
    ├── 1080p
    ├── 2k
    └── 4k

Problem 2:
Clear your terminal. in the lab6 directory, create the following directory structure. Display a tree of the directory. Take a screenshot:

assets/
├── imgs
│   ├── large
│   └── small
└── video
    ├── large
    └── small

Problem 3:
Clear your terminal. in the lab6 directory, create the following directory structure. You need to create the pdf files as well. Remember mkdir creates directories while touch creates files. Display a tree of the directory. Take a screenshot:

docs/
└── books
    ├── history
    │   ├── fall
    │   │   └── book.pdf (this is a file not a directory)
    │   └── spring
    │       └── book.pdf (this is a file not a directory)
    └── math
        ├── fall
        │   └── book.pdf (this is a file not a directory)
        └── spring
            └── book.pdf (this is a file not a directory)

Problem 4: Brace expansion comes handy in other scenarios too. Here are some examples:

Create a directory in your home directory called lab6-q5. From the root of the filesystem create 3 files in the lab6-q5 directory called: program.py, people.csv, data.xls.
Change your current working directory to /usr/share. Create a directory in the lab6-q5 directory called movies. Create 3 files in the ~/lab6-q5/movies directory called movies.lst, marvel.txt and disney.doc.
Remove the files: program.py, people.csv, disney.doc, and marvel.txt.

Take a screenshot of your terminal showing all the commands that you used to complete this question.

Challenge Question

Run this curl command:
curl https://cis106.com/assets/lab6cq.sh | bash

This will create a directory in your home directory called: challenge-Lab6 This directory has a bunch of files. Organize these file so that each file type has its own directory. Each file type must be moved to its respective directory. When you are done, the challenge-Lab6 directory should look like this:

challenge-lab6/
├── audio
│   ├── aac
│   │   └── all-aac-files-here
│   └── mp3
│       └── all-mp3-files-here
├── docs
│   ├── docx
│   │   └── all-docs-files-here
│   ├── pdf
│   │   └── all-pdf-files-here
│   └── xls
│       └── all-xls-files-here
└── images
    ├── jpg
    │   └── all-jpg-files-here
    └── png
        └── all-png-files-here

Note: The directory tree you see here is just an example, you may or may not have the same files.

Tips

Try to create your directory structure in a single command.
Try working with multiple terminal windows open.
List all the files in the directory sorted by file extensions to understand which directories you need to create.

Take a screenshot of your terminal showing all the commands that you used to complete this question.

What will you Submit:

Place all the screenshots and answers to your questions in a the lab6.md file.
Convert your markdown file to pdf
Push the changes to Github:
git pull; git add .; git commit -m "lab5 complete; git push"
Submit the URL of lab6.md and the pdf file
Take a snapshot of your system and delete the previous snapshot.

Special Note

You are going to be using the git commands a lot. Here is a quick reference:

git clone repository/url/here: is the command to clone a repository where cloning means downloading a repository to your computer
git pull: to pull/synchronize your repository from github to your local machine. Always run this command BEFORE you start working VS Code
git add .: to track all the changes made to your file.
git commit -m "label for your changes here": this command will label all the changes you added with the add command
git push: will send all your changes to your github repository

Always run the commands in this order: pull => add => commit => push Never use the github website to make changes to your repository unless you know what you are doing and can remember to pull the changes before working on your local repository!