Urgent help on Linux

yep

/home/msabbar/sample_dir2
`-- sample_dir
|-- admin
|-- cambridge
| |-- cafeteria
| |-- library
| `-- security
| |-- annex
| |-- building
| `-- parking
|-- faculty
|-- history.exe
|-- markham
| |-- annex
| |-- building1
| `-- parking
`-- stenton
|-- gen_ed
| |-- Holidays
| `-- cars2
|-- lib_arts
| |-- english.txt
| `-- match.doc
`-- phone_directory

11 directories, 12 files

Your current directory is sample_dir. Display cars2 sorted numerically by
the 4th field:

i can't show files within cars2...all i can show is the tree

isn't cars2 a file? use less on it and see what is in there.

cat stenton/gen_ed/cars2 | sort -nk 4 is most appropriate.

You don;t need to cat the file first. You can just sort it...

sort -nk 4 stenton/gen_ed/cars2

sorting by fields is tricky though because I think it requires whitespace as a field separator. Not totally sure though because I'm a college dropout.

sort has -t to set the separator.

you're right
but I don't get why cat or less or ls wouldn't work if it is asking me to display it?

ls lists the files. cat displays the contents of a file. more or less show the contents of a file with page breaks and some tput formatting. Most commands that operate on the contents of a file do the cat for you. In the old days, you would have to cat a file and pipe the output to another command.

what wacky software are you using for this? how do you know when you get the "right answer"? does it go DING!!?

maybe they replaced your shell with some weird shell, and it's not really a shell at all. it just wants you to put in the "correct command" and then it goes DING!!?

for this question
11 directories, 12 files

Your current directory is sample_dir. Display only the 1st field (last name)
of each record in phone_directory:

do i want to use the 'cut' command?

cut, awk or sed.

or perl, hehe

yes exactly

sounds like a plan!

then that is probably why you can't cat or ls or less the file, because they think you don't need to do that.

so i do
cut -f1 stenton/phone_directory
and
cut -f stenton/phone_directory
cut -uf 1 stenton/phone_directory

cut -uf1 stenton/phone_directory

nothing

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cut -d : -f 1 stenton/phone_directory

nothing? come on, doesn't it give you an error message?

look at the phone_directory file with cat, less, more, vi, emacs, nano, or pico, and find out what the fields look like, and what the field separators are. read the cut man page and figure it out

Your current directory is sample_dir ..

Is phone_directory in the stenton directory?

yeah i know that...and sample_dir/stenton/phone_directory
since i am currently in it, i type in stenton/phone_directroy

how about the "file" command, can you use that?

file stenton/phone_directory

cut -f1 phone_directory

no
cuz phone_directory is in stenton
and stenton is in sample_dir
and i am in sample_dir


so more likely cut -f1 stenton/phone_directory
but that was not the answer either

can you cat the phone_directory? use less? can you use find to find it?

They might want the delimiter argument to cut ? Hard to tell without being able to see the contents of the file.

AAAHHHHHHH


found it

cut -d' ' -f1 stenton/phone_directory

guys now icant answer this

/home/msabbar/sample_dir2
`-- sample_dir
|-- admin
|-- cambridge
| |-- cafeteria
| |-- library
| `-- security
| |-- annex
| |-- building
| `-- parking
|-- cars3
|-- faculty
|-- history.exe
|-- markham
| |-- annex
| |-- building1
| `-- parking
`-- stenton
|-- gen_ed
| |-- Holidays
| `-- cars2
|-- lib_arts
| |-- english.txt
| `-- match.doc
`-- phone_directory

11 directories, 13 files

Your current directory is sample_dir. Create a compressed archive of the stenton directory and it's contents,
called stenton.tar.gz, and place it in the sample_dir directory. Use a non-verbose tar command with a single
option string, including the option to invoke gzip: