Homework 1: Linux Command Line & File Management

Homework 1: Linux Command Line & File Management#

Due Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026

Virtual Desktop Environment Workflow#

Refer to the high-level workflow diagram below for establishing your remote environment session before starting the assignment.

[Web access to Ravada portal with authentication] ===> [Start VM] ===> [Access VM via SSH with provided port]
                                                                                     |
                                                                                     v
                                                                   [Create & Navigate to ~/HW_1]
                                                                                     |
                                                                                     v
                                                                 [Execute Assigned Shell Commands]

Instructions#

Complete all tasks directly on your assigned Virtual Desktop (VD) instance. Document your commands and output as required by your instructor.

Section 1: Directory Setup & Reading#

  1. Access your Virtual Desktop environment.

  2. Create a working directory named HW_1 in your home folder:

    mkdir ~/HW_1

  3. Navigate into HW_1 and complete all exercises listed in Section 1.20 of your course textbook.

Section 2: System File Copying & Disk Inspection#

  1. Inside HW_1, create a sub-directory named Files:

    mkdir Files

  2. Copy the system kernel file vmlinuz-6.12.105+deb13-amd64 into your newly created Files directory.

  3. Check the disk space utilization of the Files directory using the du command.

Section 3: File Acquisition & Archive Extraction#

  1. Download the Midnight Commander source archive from the following URL using wget or curl:

    https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/midnightcommander/mc-4.8.33.tar.bz2

  2. Extract all files from the compressed archive mc-4.8.33.tar.bz2.

Section 4: Search, Cleanup, and Consolidation Operations#

Perform the following operations within the extracted source directory tree:

  1. Locate Build Files: Find all instances of files named Makefile.am within the mc-4.8.33 directory.

  2. Locate Data Directories: Search for all directories named data.

  3. Targeted Cleanup: Locate and remove all directories named hu.

  4. Size Analysis: Identify the largest single file within the directory.

  5. Recursive Data Copy: Recursively copy all directories named data into a new directory named all_data inside your HW_1 folder.

  6. Archive Creation: Create a compressed gzipped tar archive of the all_data directory named all_data.tgz:

    tar -czvf all_data.tgz all_data