42 Piscine Day 2 — (01)

Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.

Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here

Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here

Right so today was better than yesterday, still hard, spent all day in the lab, was helped and helped a lot of other students, feeling the flow. I’ve buddied up with a couple of the guys who did this before, collaborating with them we are pushing through pretty fast and not spending time on things that matter less.

Apparently you are expected to get about 25% of the projects completed that are assigned. More important is doing well on the tests. There are some cadets (those who are official students and not trying out as we are) here who had nearly straight 100% for everyday. It’s intimidating. but I think I have a better idea of what’s expected now.

The grading system is different than I’ve ever seen. If you don’t pass the first assignment perfectly all other future assignments are not counted. This continues onward. If the second isn’t perfect then the third onward isn’t counted etc. So most important is really nailing and perfecting the first several assignments rather than skipping ahead.

We also found a study guide for the tests on github, apparently there are solutions to the projects on github as well but I’ve avoided looking them up as I actually want to understand what’s going on. But the link for the test study guides for those interested is here. A few of the guys and myself are going to do study sessions for the test coming up tonight, I think this will be a good use of time.

Also of note, you have to be responsible to sign up for the work for the day, if you miss the timeline (11:42 PM — 8:42 AM) then you cannot sign up for the day. Some days you can sign up a few days ahead of time, I signed up for up to day 4. Some students missed signing up for today because they slept in past 9AM, they had to have overrides to be able to do the work.

Today the assignments were as follows

1. groups, paths, and replacing spaces with commas
2. find all the files ending in .sh, remove all that is not the file name (directory, file ending (.sh))
3. count all the files and directories including the one you are in
4. list mac addresses with line breaks and no other data
5. make a file with a really strange name (I didn’t get it figured out)
6. skip every other line of output
7. reverse, alphabetical sort, only show logins
8. list number of users with bon in their name
9. changing numbers and letters from mrdoc base to gtaio luSnemf base (I have no idea what this means)

Those were the assignments today, hope it helps someone.