Little Women Exercise

Hello folks! If you got here that means you have survived the December 9th-10th Carpentries workshop at the University of Arizona!

Learning Shell, Python and Git can be extremely confusing, and quite overwhelming, therefore be proud of yourself!

Tying It All Together

This repository's goal is to bring together the materials covered this past couple of days, by using Bash, Git and Python. We are going to use the novel Little Women (LittleWomen.txt) from yesterday's shell-lesson-data folder in order to reinforce your computational learning experience.

The 4 main protagonists of the book - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - are here to help us figuring out what is within the 2 secret zip files in this repository! Meg has the key to finding out what is behind secret-1.zip whilst Jo, Beth and Amy are here to help us with secret-2.zip.

Following, you're going to find instructions which you can follow at your own pace.

Repository Contents

In this repository, you'll find the following structure:

.
├── README.md                   <- This file
├── secret-1.zip                <- Compressed file #1
└── secret-2.zip                <- Compressed file #2

Each of the zip files should be decompressed in order to finish the exercise 🙂.

The first file (secret-1.zip) is protected by a 3 digit password (formatted: xxx), whilst the second (secret-2.zip) will be protected by 3 numbers separated by dots (formatted: xxxx.xxx.xxx).

Instructions

1. Import this repository to your GitHub account.
2. Clone the imported repository to your machine.
3. Navigate to the example folder from yesterday and find LittleWomen.txt (located in shell-lesson-data/exercise-data/writing/LittleWomen.txt) and copy it to the newly cloned repository.
4. Decompressing secret-1.zip:
   • Using the command line*, find how many times Meg, one of Little Women's main protagonists, gets mentioned. The answer will be the password to opening the file.
5. Decompressing secret-1.zip revealed a Jupyter Notebook! Add, commit, and push your changes back to GitHub so that you can run the Jupyter Notebook using Colab (or run it on your machine). Follow the instructions in the Jupyter Notebook to find out what numbers will open the second secret!

*Command line help

we might have not covered how to do this in yesterday's lecture, but here's a hint: use grep, wc and redirection (the "pipe", |).

• grep is a incredibly strong tool that allows users to pick a string (e.g., word or part of a word) from a file. Using the man or --help option find out what the capabilites of grep are. Watch out for case sensitivity! We want to pick up "Meg", so careful of the capital letter :).
• | take the output of grep and send it directly to the next command!
• wc will count the words piped from grep.

Hints!

You can find the above number with a single command line :).

grep hint

-o and -w are the only 2 flags you may want to use for this.

• -o: The -o option tells grep to only output the matched parts of the text
• -w: This option tells grep to match only whole words. It ensures that "Meg" is treated as a standalone word and not part of another word.

wc hint

use -l with wc! (such as wc -l): This command counts the number of lines in the input it receives. Since we used grep with the -o option, each line will correspond to an occurrence of the word "Meg".

Don't feel like you're alone, we are here to help! Best of luck!!

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Answers

Click me if things get too complicated and you still want to get to the end (don't spoil yourself!)

secret-1.zip decompress with 683. The one liner: grep -o -w "Meg" LittleWomen.txt | wc -l

secret-2.zip decompress with 1352.457.640 (almost like an IP address 😉)