Activities: Week 6 (through fall break)¶

1. Open the text editor you installed: Sublime Text. You will be creating and saving 4 different files to your Desktop.

In the first file, put the following:

print("hello world")

Save the file as prog1.py. You’ve now saved a Python program on your computer.

In the second file, put the following:

def greeting(x):
    return "hello " + x

print(greeting("there"))

Save this file as prog2.py.

In the third file, put the following:

this is a file
it has
multiple
lines

Save this as unix_test_text.txt.

In the fourth file, put the following:

here is another file
what a wonderful
story this is

Save this file as another_text.txt.

No need to take a screenshot of the file saving since you need them for the rest of the exercises, but if it’s not working or is confusing, let staff know right away so we can help.

2. Open your Command Prompt program – Terminal or Git Bash. cd to your Desktop, as you saw in the chapter. Then type ls. You should see a list of all file names on your Desktop, including the files you just saved in step 1. If you have any directories saved in your Desktop, you’ll also see those names, of course. Take a screenshot that shows this worked for you.

3. You now want to make a new directory called new_class_programs in your Desktop, and copy prog1.py and prog2.py into it. (Note that files will NOT disappear from your desktop when you’ve completed this step. There should be a copy of each file in both places.)

Use Unix commands to do this, and take a screenshot of the commands you use + evidence they worked. (Hint: using commands like cd and ls and pwd can help you check what you’ve done when you’re creating directories and copying files around! It will also be useful to remind yourself of what mkdir and cp do.)

There is more than one perfectly reasonable way to complete this exercise, but all ways use a similar set of Unix commands.

4. Now, you want to create a new directory inside the new_class_programs directory, called text_files, and copy both unix_test_text.txt and another_text.txt into that folder. Use Unix commands to do this.

When you’ve completed that, change directories to be inside that folder in your command prompt, and use the pwd command to show the full path of your location. (It should look something like this: /Users/Jackie/Desktop/new_class_programs/text_files)

Take a screenshot showing that these things worked for you. Your screenshot should show the command you typed + evidence it worked.

5. You want to see what content is inside each of your files. Use a unix command to view the content of prog2.py before you open it. Take a screenshot to show that this worked.

6. You want to concatenate the 2 text files inside the text_files folder together, and save the result in a file called big_story.txt, which should also be inside that directory. Use unix commands to do this. (Hint: You’ll probably need more than 1 typed in the same line.)

7. You now want to see a list of all the files and/or directories inside your new_class_programs folder whose names include text. Use Unix commands to do this. (Hint: You’ll need pipe (|) and grep, and ls.)

8. Now that you have a bunch of practice with the unix command prompt, it’s time to run Python natively on your computer. You’ve saved 2 Python files that are in your ~/Desktop/new_class_programs directory. Go there in your command prompt, and run prog2.py by typing python prog2.py at the prompt. Take a screenshot of what happens.

(Feel free to also play around – you know a lot of programming now, and you can run it all on your computer, but it will look a little bit different in the command prompt than it did in the textbook.)