Table of Contents

Corning Community College

CSCS1730 UNIX/Linux Fundamentals

PROJECT: The next Next Puzzle Box (TPB2)

OBJECTIVE

To continue to cultivate your problem solving skills, and to demonstrate your basic scripting skills for task automation.

COMMENTARY

The first puzzlebox was in many ways a test of your observational skills. To many, the frustrations emerged from what was being taken for granted. But once you took proper notice, and could apply the appropriate skills, its secrets could be obtained.

The second puzzlebox will test both your observation skills (in a slightly different way) and reasoning skills in an abstract manner. Along with that, your scripting skills are being put to the test as well: your submission will more heavily rely upon a fully functional steps file that will entirely automate the process. If you are observant, the information you need is presented early on, but is a few layers of abstraction out of reach. Patience and perseverance will be key to victory.

This third one continues to put your skills to the test with new and exciting obfuscations.

PROCESS

Do note, the productive way to go about this project involves taking the following steps:

If you start too late, and do not ask questions, and do not have enough time and don't know what is going on, you are not doing the project correctly.

TASK

You are to unravel the puzzle, getting to the instructions inside. Be wary of deceptions and obstacles trying to throw you off track.

You are seeking the creation of two files, that you will submit:

EDIT

You will want to go here to edit and fill in the various sections of the document:

tpb2

Steps

Helpful Commands

Some commands that could help are:

  • rev - reverses the text of a file horizontally
  • grep - can be used to check if a file matches an entry in the MANIFEST
  • tr -
  • uudecode -Used to decode uuencoded files
  • base64 -Displays contents of a file to output in base64 encoding. The -d modifier displays decoded base64 files to output
  • unxz - Can be used to uncompress a xz file.
  • bzip2 -A form of compression similar to zip.
  • sed - Stream editor for filtering and transforming text
  • chmod - Allows you to change permissions of a file
  • cat - Use to see image/words of a file
  • gzip -d can be used to decompress a gzip file

Process

Final Pictures

There are several different end pictures that people would need to find.

These pictures include:

  • Kirby
  • Mudkip
  • MegaMan
  • Nyan Cat
 

SUBMISSION

To be successful in this project, the following criteria (or their equivalent) must be met:

Submit Tool Usage

Let's say you have completed work on the project, and are ready to submit, you would do the following: 

lab46:~/src/SEMESTER/DESIG/PROJECT$ submit DESIG PROJECT file1 file2 file3 ... fileN

You should get some sort of confirmation indicating successful submission if all went according to plan. If not, check for typos and or locational mismatches.

RUBRIC

I'll be evaluating the project based on the following criteria: 

52:tpb2:final tally of results (52/52)
*:tpb2:submitted tpb2.results file via submit tool [3/3]
*:tpb2:submitted tpb2steps file via submit tool [3/3]
*:tpb2:both files pushed to lab46 semester repository [6/6]
*:tpb2:tpb2.results is correctly unscrambled and assembled [6/6]
*:tpb2:tpb2.results md5sum matches project MANIFEST [6/6]
*:tpb2:tpb2steps has valid list of non-interactive instructions [3/3]
*:tpb2:tpb2steps uses shell features like wildcards, IO redir [3/3]
*:tpb2:tpb2steps contains comments explaining process [3/3]
*:tpb2:tpb2steps automates the project when executed [3/3]
*:tpb2:tpb2steps when executed outputs nothing [3/3]

Pertaining to the collaborative authoring of project documentation

Additionally