Command-line Olympics
Attending
- Hackers of all backgrounds and experience levels.
Elliott Biondo
I am a fourth year graduate student in nuclear engineering working under Paul Wilson. My research is in radiation transport methods for nuclear activation problems encountered in fusion energy devices.
Command-line Olympics
The Command-line Olympics will be a competition between small teams to complete a series of tasks, each requiring a single UNIX command. Participants should bring laptops; there will need to be at least one laptop per group with access to a UNIX command-line.
At the beginning of the hour, participants will form small groups and those with a lot of experience will be encouraged to spread out. Then a text file will be distributed, containing around 20 challenges of increasing difficulty. The tasks range in difficulty from printing the contents of files to producing animated plots (and more!). Completing these challenges will require the heavy use of search engines and online resources. Each team will produce a single shell script with their solutions. After 45 minutes (or as time permits) each team will be asked to run their shell script on one of the wall monitors so we can judge their progress. Whoever completes the most challenges–in order–will be the winner. Each team will be allowed 1 skip and 2 hints. It is highly unlikely that any team will complete all of the challenges within the allotted time. Answers will then be posted for a short group discussion.