Exercises: Shell, git, and GitHub

Exercise 1

Problem

Navigate to directory cl_demo/. Explore and map out everything in cl_demo/. Draw a tree diagram as in the slide titled Path Diagram.

Solution

You should see there exists a README.md and three directories: data/, scripts/, and simulation/.

In data/ we have cars.txt, diamonds.txt, and mtcars.txt. In scripts/ we have generate_data.R, plot_data.R, summarise_data.R. In simulation/ we have 592 .txt files.

Exercise 2

Problem

Create two new folders in cl_demo/simulation/ with names p500 and p1000. Move all simulation results with parameter \(p\) being 500 to folder p500/. Similarly, move all simulation results with parameter \(p\) being 1000 to folder p1000/.

Solution

Assuming you start in cl_demo/, the commands would be

cd simulation/          # navigate to folder simulation/
mkdir p500/ p1000/      # create 2 new directories
mv *p500*.txt p500/     # move p500 files
mv *p1000*.txt p1000/   # move p1000 files

Exercise 3

Problem

Which flag (option) associated with the shell command rm allows you to delete a directory and all the files in it?

Solution

Flags -r, -R, --recursive allow you to remove directories and their contents recursively. Flags -d and --dir only allow you to remove empty directories.

Exercise 4

Problem

How do you pull up the manual page for git reset? What does git reset do?

Solution

Provided git is installed,

man git-reset

Dashes should link git and the associated command. Similarly, man git-status will display the manual page for command git status.

Command git reset resets the current HEAD to the specified state. This is how you can undo an add, undo a commit, undo a merge or pull, and more.