May 22
- Please refrain from sending email asking what your course grade was;
course grades will be available as soon as Testudo is updated.
Check Testudo later tonight or tomorrow.
- Dr. Sussman's students (sections 010X): if you have questions while
Dr. Sussman is out of the country, you may contact Larry Herman, who
will do his best to answer them in the interim. Larry Herman has
the finals from your sections as well, in case you would like to see
yours while Dr. Sussman is away.
- The Project 7 secret tests are in the public Grace directory, all of
the results for all projects should now be visible on the submit server,
and all of the grades for all coursework should now be visible on the
grade server.
- The final exam statistics were:
average:
|
130.8/200 (65.4%)
|
standard deviation:
|
27.3
|
Final exam distribution:
90-100% (180-200):
|
5
|
80-89% (160-179):
|
30
|
70-79% (140-159):
|
45
|
60-69% (120-139):
|
64
|
50-59% (100-119):
|
44
|
40-49% (80-99):
|
15
|
< 40% (< 80):
|
10
|
- Have a great summer!
May 10
Project 6 secret tests are in public Grace
directory and results are visible on submit server.
May 9
Practice final exam answers posted.
The instructors will have office hours on
Friday and Saturday, before the final exam. Hours are:
- Friday: 11AM–1PM – L. Herman
2PM–4PM – A. Sussman
- Saturday: 1:30PM–3PM – L. Herman
May 8
Hyun will have some extra office hours this
afternoon, from 5:00-6:30 p.m., so if you have any last-minute questions
you can get them answered then.
May 6
- Practice final exam posted.
- Project 5 secret tests are in public Grace directory and results are
visible on submit server.
May 3
Dr. Sussman's office hours today are from
2-3PM instead of 3-4PM.
May 2
- The final deadline
for submitting any projects in order to satisfy the requirement of
having at least half the public tests working, for all projects, by the
end of the semester, so as to be eligible to pass the course, will be Thursday, May 17, 8:00:00 p.m.
Such submissions will not be worth any additional credit. See the
course syllabus for full details about this requirement.
- Project 7 public tests are in the public Grace directory and the
submit server is open for submissions.
- Exam 2 answers are posted. For grading questions, see the course
instructors in office hours.
May 1
Project 7 is posted, and the project tarfile
is in the public Grace directory.
April 30
- For project 6, due today, there is a clarification about error
messages you have to print. We will not test cases where processes run
in background have errors when they are running, because it is not
always possible to determine the exit status of a background process in
a timely way.
- If you are having trouble with the campus wireless network today (we
have heard reports that it is unreliable), you can go to any of the OIT
workstation labs to work on your project. The locations of the OIT labs
are listed at www.oit.umd.edu/wheretogo/showLoc.cfm.
April 28
Ran will have some extra office hours late
Monday afternoon, from 5:00-6:30 p.m., so if you have any last-minute
questions you can get them answered then.
April 26
For Project 6, there has been some confusion
about output file redirection. Either form, truncating with ">" or
appending with ">>", creates the output file if it does not already
exist.
April 21
Project 6 public tests are in the public
Grace directory and the submit server is open for submissions.
April 19
Dr. Sussman's office hours today will start
at 3:30 instead of 3:00
April 17
Practice Exam 2 answers posted.
Project 4 secret tests are in public Grace
directory and results are visible on submit server.
April 16
Project 6 is posted, and the project tarfile
is in the public Grace directory.
April 15
Practice Exam 2 is posted
April 12
If you would like to help a fellow
undergraduate by completing a three-minute survey about Ethical Hacking
click
here.
April 11
Matthew will have some extra office hours
late tomorrow afternoon (Thursday the 12th), from 5:00-6:30 p.m., so if
you have any last-minute questions you can get them answered then.
April 6
Project 5 public tests are in the public
Grace directory and the submit server is open for submissions.
April 3
Project #5 is posted, and the project
tarfile is in the public Grace directory.
April 2
- Many students have a large number of unnecessary files, that take
up a great deal of disk space. These are files whose names end
in .gch. Please go through all of your project directories, and
remove any files whose names have the extension .gch, to free up much
of the course disk space.
- Note the extra office hours for this afternoon mentioned below.
April 1
Mohammed will have some extra office hours
late tomorrow afternoon (Monday the 2nd), from 5:00-6:30 p.m., so if you
have any last-minute questions you can get them answered then.
March 29
Before submitting, you should execute the
command "make clean" followed by "make public01 public02 public03 public04
public05 driver" to ensure that your makefile builds all the public tests
correctly. (Note: the names
must appear in this order in the command.)
March 28
Project 4 public tests are in the public
Grace directory and the submit server is open for submissions.
March 27
For Project #4, anything from Project #3
that does not have different behavior specified in this project should
apply exactly as was specified for Project #3. One example of this rule is
for the return values for rm() and re_name(), which should both return 0
if no error condition occurs, just as for the functions written for
Project #3.
March 25
For Project #4, the specification for
re_name() was incomplete. If either the first or second argument are empty
strings, the function should return -2. The posted specification has been
updated.
We have also noticed that the error message printed by the driver for
re_name() may be somewhat confusing in the case where -3 is returned, but
as long as your function returns the correct value for each case
specified, your function is correct.
March 18
Project #4 is posted, and the project
tarfile is in the public Grace directory.
March 17
Project #3 secret tests are in the public
Grace directory and results are visible on the submit server.
March 15
Exam #1 answers are posted.
March 9
Please note that the Project #3 assignment
says, in several places, that arrays may
not be used to store the components of a Filesystem.
You must use some type or combination of linked structures. We
noticed that a few students are not following this restriction, which will
lead to a very poor result on the project. Linked structures vs.
arrays were discussed in CMSC 132 (some examples of linked data structures
are linked lists and binary trees), and although arrays are obviously very
useful, the purpose of this project is to use linked structures in C.
Character strings may be used to store file and directory names, but as
the project assignment says there is no
maximum size for names, so nothing in your definition of a Filesystem
can assume any type of limit. The only time that you know the size
of a name is when the functions mkdir() and touch()
are called.
If you have any questions about how to design your data structure feel
free to ask in office hours.
March 7
For technical reasons, we have to give you
the source file driver.c instead of the object file driver.o (as well as
an updated Makefile for the public tests). The original driver.o may not
work correctly with your code, so don't use it. You can either copy the
new files from the 216public/project3 directory, or get the new project
tarfile and public tests tarfile and and extract the files from there
(only driver.o and the Makefile have changed, but it's OK to extract the
tarfiles again). If your project worked with driver.o, it will still work
with driver.c . And driver.c uses some I/O features that have not been
discussed in class, so you don't have to read the code in driver.c or
understand it, to use it.
March 5
Dr. Sussman's office hours for today are
cancelled.
March 4
Project 3 public tests are in the public
Grace directory and the submit server is open for submissions.
March 3
Practice Exam 1 is posted
February 29
Larry Herman's Thursday morning office hours
(Thursday 10:30-11:30) will be cancelled
tomorrow (March 1), and will be shifted to 11-12 next Thursday (March 8)
due to a conflict. All of his other office hours remain unchanged
(including his Thursday afternoon office hours 4-5).
February 28
Project 3 is posted, and the project tarfile
is in the public Grace directory.
February 25
- The graded Project #1 style results have been emailed as described in
class, the secret tests are available on the Grace machines, and the
secret test results are visible on the submit server.
- Larry Herman's office hours will begin on Monday, according to the
schedule below and on the office hours handout.
February 18
- Project 2 public tests are in the public Grace directory. The
submit server will be open for submissions shortly.
- Note that there is only one Project #2 public test source file,
public01.c,
which is used for all nine public tests. The program is the same,
and only the input data file is different for each test. Type the
command make to build the executable public01,
then run that same executable with input redirected from publicXX.input, comparing
the results to publicXX.output,
for all nine tests. Note that the public test uses a function compare_arrays(),
which is defined in the provided file testutils.c.
- If your tests are in a file with a name of the form
test*.c
(for example test1.c, test02.c, etc.) the
included Makefile will build your test executable if you
give a command like make test1 or make test02.
Your tests can also use the function compare_arrays().
Or you may want to just use our public01.c test for all of
your own tests, and only vary the input files, as we did, if you're sure
you can test all the behavior that way.
February 15
Project 2 is posted, and the project tarfile
is in the public Grace directory.
- February 12
- When we set the midterm dates on the syllabus we were basing things on
an inaccurate date that had been on the University's website.
Since it will be helpful to have a little more time before exams, we
moved the two midterm dates back by a week each; they will be on March 8
and April 19 rather than the dates that originally appeared.
Apologies for any confusion, and let us know if you have a problem
taking the exams on the new dates..
- February 8
-
On a UNIX system users can have conversations via messages that show
up on each others' terminals (they say something like "talk:
connection requested"). A user can also write things that show up on everyone's
terminal (they start with "Broadcast Message"). Very occasionally
these are informative messages from the systems staff, but most often
they are just people wasting everyone's time. To suppress these types
of messages use the command mesg n. To have this take
effect every time you log in add it to the end of the file ~/.cshrc.mine.
(Be sure to press return or enter at the end of the line, otherwise it
won't work.)
February 7
Project 1 public tests are in the public
Grace directory, and the submit server is open for submissions.
February 6
Project 1 is posted, and the project tarfile
is in the public Grace directory.
February 2
- January 30
-
Welcome to the CMSC 216 webpage!
-
Make sure you always have a correct and working
email address entered in the University's records on Testudo.
Check and change it here
if necessary.
-
If you don't have one already, apply for a TerpConnect account
at www.oit.umd.edu/new.
It will be used to do programming work for this course.
Web Accessibility