pete > courses > CS 202 Spring 24 > Tier 2, Phase 1, Problem 00: Welcome to Weathertop

Tier 2, Phase 1, Problem 00: Welcome to Weathertop

In this assignment, you will familiarize yourself with using weathertop, the machine you will use to practice Tier 1 (mechanical) operations, submit Tier 2 (application) and Tier 3 (Project) work, and perform other activities related to the course. Your submission will consist of a single text file that identifies the name of the text editor you prefer (details further down).

Using the 202 program on weathertop

Throughout the course, you will need to both ssh to weathertop and copy files to and from weathertop. Here are instructions for performing those operations with department machines, of which weathertop is one. In those instructions, you will use the name weathertop instead of basin. For now, your use of the shell will be extremely limited, so don’t worry about stuff in that guide that makes no sense. If you have questions or are unable to get the rest of the stuff on for this problem working, talk to me or the course assistants ASAP.

Upon successfully logging into weathertop, you will see a prompt, which is some informative text (likely including your username) followed by a "$" and then a cursor. This is the text interface (the shell) awaiting your input. Whenever I show interactions with the shell, I will use the "$" to indicate where you are typing.

Most of your interaction with weathertop over the semester will be using the 202 program. To run any program, include that one, type its name and press Enter. Just like functions, programs can be given arguments when you run them: for programs, arguments are provided as text following the name of the program, before you press Enter. If you run the 202 program without arguments, it tells you how to use it:

$ 202
Usage: 202 [options] operation
Options:
    -h      this output
Operations:
    hi
    practice
    submit

This program follows a fairly standard pattern in modern command-line programs, in that it performs a variety of different operations, and you need to identify which one you want to perform as an argument.

Run the 202 program again, this time tell it to run the hi operation:

$ 202 hi
Hi pjohnson!

(When you run it, you should see your own username. If you see my username, we’ve got big problems.)

You only need to do this once: it tells the system that you’re taking the course and sets up some bookkeeping stuff for you. If you try to do other things with the 202 program before you’ve said hi, it will complain at you and decline to acquiesce.

The practice and submit operations are used for practice problems and submitting work. Below, you will find instructions for submitting your solution to this problem. Try out the practice operation and see if you can figure out how it works. If you run into problems, talk to the course staff (which includes me) or other students in the course.

Text editors

Find and install a text editor of your choice. Sublime Text is solid choice that works on all platforms; vim and emacs are classics (though with a non-trivial learning curve); VSCode seems to be popular these days; there are many other choices. I wrote some semi-relevant drivel but it’s probably superfluous for now.

Submission Requirements

You will submit a single text file. The name of the file must be text-editor.txt and its contents must be the name of the text editor you choose to use for this course.

Submission Instructions

Copy the text-editor.txt file to weathertop (or create it there in the first place using the remote-editing capabilities of your text editor, described in the link at the top), and then run:

$ 202 submit t2p1p00 text-editor.txt
File text-editor.txt submitted at 2890-09-22 14:45:31.

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