Keep a log in the file lab3.txt of what you do in the
lab so that you can reproduce the results later. This should not
merely be a transcript of what you typed: it should be more like a
true lab notebook, in which you briefly note down what you did and
what happened.
You're helping to build an application containing a shell script
that invokes the ls
command to get file status.
Your application is running atop the Maroon Chapeau Enterprise Linux 5 distribution, which uses the ls implementation supplied by Coreutils 7.6.
You've been
running into the problem that for some users ls generates
output that looks like this:
$ ls -l /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 729040 2009-03-02 06:22 /bin/bash
The users want the traditional Unix format, which looks like this:
$ ls -l /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 729040 Mar 2 2009 /bin/bash
You've been asked to look into the problem and fix it.
You discover that the problem is that in some cases users set their
locale to a value like en_US.UTF-8, for example, by
setting the LC_ALL environment variable to that value:
$ export LC_ALL='en_US.UTF-8'
Users who have done this get the YYYY-MM-DD date instead of the traditional Unix date.
You nose around on the net, and discover that the problem is that
the locale files for Coreutils are not generated properly
(see Jim
Meyering's message of 2009-09-29,
also archived
in case the primary web site is down). Getting these files generated
and distributed to all your clients seems like a bit of a hassle, so
instead, you decide to patch the ls program instead,
using a
temporary workaround patch published by Pádraig Brady
(also archived).
Try Brady's workaround, as follows:
locale-gen program to generate
the en_US.UTF-8 locale.make at the top level of your source
tree, so that you build (but do not install) the fixed version. For each
command that gets executed, explain why it needed to be executed (or
say that it wasn't neeeded).ls works on your test case and that the
installed ls doesn't. Test on a file that has been
recently modified, and on a file that is at least a year old. You can
use
the touch
command to artficially mark a file as being a year old.Q1. Why did Brady's patch remove the line
"case_long_iso_time_style:"? Was it necessary to remove
that line? Explain.
Q2. If your company adopts this patched version of Coreutils instead of the default one, what else should you watch out for? Might this new version of Coreutils introduce other problems with your application, perhaps in countries where users don't speak English and don't understand English-format dates?
Consider the Python script
randline.py.
Q3. What happens when this script is invoked on an empty file like
/dev/null, and why?
Q4. What happens when this script is invoked with Python 3 rather than Python 2, and why? (You can run Python 3 on the SEASnet hosts by using the command python3 instead of python.)
Modify randline.py so that it takes an arbitrary
positive number of input file arguments, not just one. If an input file ends
in a non-newline character, your code should silently act as if a
newline were appended to the file. As with the
original randline.py, your program should report an error
if given no input file arguments.
Currently randline.py outputs lines with replacement;
for example, it's possible that it will output the first input line
two or more times. Modify randline.py so that it accepts
a new option -w (long
version --without-replacement) which causes it to output
lines without replacement: for example, the first input line is copied
to the output at most once. If the input contains duplicate lines, the
output can contain the same duplicates, but no more duplicates than
what appeared in the input.
With the new option it is an error if the
input file contains fewer than NUMLINE lines, just as
it is already an error without the new option to invoke
randline.py on an empty file and ask it for one or more
lines of output. You need not worry about the exact diagnostic you
generate for this new error, so long as you generate some diagnostic.
Your modified version of randline.py should use only
the string module and the modules
that randline.py already uses (it should not import any
other modules). Don't forget to change its usage message to
accurately describe the modified behavior.
Port your modified randline.py to Python 3. Make sure that it
still works with Python 2. Don't rewrite it from scratch; make as few
changes as is reasonable.
Submit the following files.
lab3.txt as described in the lab.hw3.txt containing the answer to questions
Q1 through Q4 noted above.randline.py as described
in the homework.All files should be ASCII text files, with no carriage returns, and with no more than 80 columns per line. The shell command:
expand lab3.txt hw3.txt randline.py | awk '/\r/ || 80 < length'
should output nothing.