INLS161-001 | Spring 2018

Class Session: Monday Jan 29, 2018

Basics: Lab


Here is a link to the class exercise we will do today.

In the last class when I did an awk demo, a very sharp student noticed that the single quotation marks in my awk code was not consistent between my two different examples:

 1 awk '{print $1}' students

vs.

 2 awk {'print $1'} students 

Example 1 is correct syntax for awk; example 2 is wrong, but it works. So what's going on here?

The reason why both of these worked was because awk is a weakly typed language. Weakly typed languages are more forgiving. See this article on strong and weak typing. So although both of these worked, it was actually the code on the blog page that was correct. My in-class demo was using the wrong syntax. (I don't code in awk very often, so it is easy for me to get the syntax confused, especially since it does not cause an error.)

Due to losing a day to snow, we will not have a Basics Lab Session. Instead we will cover the networks session today, January 29. If you have any problems getting your basics tasks done, make sure you get some help from a classmate or instructor outside of class before we start the HTML and Web Development Sessions.

Use this session to ...Get help outside of class to...

  1. get any of your questions asked
  2. be certain that you are comfortable with command line actions (at least the ones we have tried)
  3. be certain that you are comfortable with your FTP tool on your laptop
  4. be certain that you can access OPAL from off-campus with VPN and DUO two-step-verification

Instructor

Lawrence Jones

Office hours by appointment.