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======UNIX/Linux Fundamentals Journal======
====MONTH Day, YEAR====

This is a sample format for a dated entry. Please substitute the actual date for "Month Day, Year", and duplicate the level 4 heading to make additional entries.

As an aid, feel free to use the following questions to help you generate content for your entries:

  * What action or concept of significance, as related to the course, did you experience on this date?
  * Why was this significant?
  * What concepts are you dealing with that may not make perfect sense?
  * What challenges are you facing with respect to the course?

January 25, 2016

The first week has been an eye opener. I know I will have much to learn as I am somewhat behind the curve of the class as it seems.I learned that by opening the PUTTY terminal on my computer I am connecting to the class server on campus. I am still somewhat confused about just exactly what is the difference between UNIX and LINUX. Looking forward to reading the Mages book. Some basic notes for myself to remember...
  - Type the command "exit" to log out of the pod.
  - left click to log out of the terminal
  - passwords are not displayed

February 1, 2016

The second week I have begun to feel more confident in my basic understanding of features such as command line interface and how to use commands to navigate and create files. I still have not completely read the mages book. However what I have read so far has been a great help in introducing me to the various commands and their respective functions. So far committing these commands to memory is still a challenge however I plan to begin to compile an official list of commands as I progress through this semester. I think the big concept that I learned this week is that of pathways and navigating by using pathways. I like how file storage is compared to rooms in a house. This helped a lot to aid my understanding. One concept I still want to work on is my understanding of the difference between files and directories.

February 8, 2016

The third week I think I opened the door to a new level of UNIX knowledge. Until this week I did not realize that the home directory was not the most basic directory of the system. Learning how to compress and decompress files is a fun new toy. I am especially interested in taking a peek into the actual programming of the algorithms that make those commands possible. I wonder what other instances I would need the uses of commands such as tac. After this week I definitely feel that I have gained a much better control over navigating through directories and 

March 22, 2016

It has been a while since I wrote in the opus.NOTE: However the last time I tried to submit an opus update I had some sort of server error that prevented me from updating. I just completed udr0 far later than I would have wished to. Need to remind myself to ask many more questions than I have been. However udr0 opened my eyes to yet another level of unix magic. This projects main commands consisted of dd, bc, and uses of netpbm programs. I learned to use dd as many different types of tools that I already know such as cat and copy. I also learned that files containing only pieces of a larger file will be hard for the file command to identify. Also take note that when decoding the decoded file automatically shows up in the directory. 

March 29, 2016

Check your units!!!! Always remember when dealing with data that you must know what units you are dealing with. Just finishing up Udr1 and I spent about 3 days trying to figure out what was wrong with my project. Come to find out the main reason for this was that I calculated my bytes wrong when using a dd command to extract partition files. Remember there are 512 bytes in a sector!!! Also remember that partitions have many different formats. Don't forget how to translate little endian to big endian. for the little endian hex number 4321 the big endian is 1234. Questions that I have encountered along the way : How do windows files differ from linux when viewed through a hex editor? How can I better write scripts?

April 5, 2016

Working more with hex editors with the udr0-3 projects. As far as editors are concerned I need more work with bvi and od. I know od is like cat for binary files and bvi is like hexedit. However I don't know the exact difference between bvi and hexedit. This work with binary files has sparked my interest as to how music editors work in relation to the actual binary code of music. Also this has further piqued my interest in learning more about encoding and compressing files. Another thing I am still very new to is shell scripting. I am still trying to get the hang of how it works but I can definitely see the convenience it allows compared to normal programming.

April 11, 2016

I Finally understand file permissions alot better! Thanks to urev I don't think I will forget them that easily.
Things to Work on:
- Understand the actual functions of setUid and like commands
- Understanding regular expressions better
- Getting better at writing scripts.
Things to Remember:
-The file permissions are represented in octal.
-The first number in 4 number file permission sequence is setuid stuff
Things to investigate:
-writing a script that can rewrite all file permissions for all files in a directory.
-Using loops in scripts
- Finding and using other commands such as cut, head, tail, sort, sed, etc.

April 18, 2016

Been working on the grade calculator this week. I definitely feel like I have greatly progressed as far as script writing and basic usage of regular expressions are concerned. Still have a long way to go before I begin to feel fluent with regular expressions. I have come to find that my greatest obstacle all semester has not been implementing the knowledge that I have learned. But rather finding the information outside of class. Oddly enough the hardest information for me to find is usually more trivial in the grand scheme of things. Something simple like not leaving a space after the "=" assignment operator of a variable is often so much more difficult for me to find than how to actually assign the variable. I definitely feel that my main bottleneck for this Linux class has been locating my desired information outside of class. Maybe this means I should investigate new research strategies. Today I learned that I should start researching all the possible directions my major can go. The more I experiment with what I like to do now, the easier it will be to pick a focus topic down the road.

April 29, 2016 (Was attempted to submit on April 26)

gfo0 Questions/Sub Tasks:

- Capture JUST the PROJECTS category as produced by the status tool?

 status unix | grep 'final tally'

- Determine the total number of projects evaluated? 

status unix | grep -v 'bonus' | grep -c 'final tally'

- Figure out which project(s) was/were worth the most points? 



- Figure out which project(s) was/were worth the least amount of points?



- Figure out the total number of project points available?

TotPosPoints=`status unix | grep 'final tally' | cut -d')' -f1 |
                           cut -d'/' -f2 | tr '\n' '+'`

TotPosPoints="${TotPosPoints}0"

TotPosPoints=`echo "$TotPosPoints" | bc`

echo $TotPosPoints

- Determine the total number of points you received on projects?

TotActPoints=`cat status | grep 'final tally' | cut -d'/' -f1 |
        cut -d'(' -f2 | tr '\n' '+'`

TotActPoints="${TotActPoints}0"

TotActPoints=`echo "$TotActPoints" | bc`

echo $TotActPoints







May 10, 2016



Final week. Learned alot about looping this week and last week with the eoce projects. I accidentally misread the instructions to the full moon finding script and because of this I added a whole extra "countdown" function that was not even required.  I am feeling pretty confident about linux in general. More importantly I am confident in my ability to find and learn new information as necessary. One thing that struck me interesting earlier today was that I have yet to use the GUI version of linux. One of my fellow students was telling me he recently installed a linux system and is still trying to figure it out. He said it took him forever to install a program. It crossed my mind that I may not have ever done that during this course. Or if I did I guess I didn't totally understand that that is what I was doing. I recently saw a couple open positions for linux administrators. It made me wonder what else I would need to know before I am qualified for that position.
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