Verifying Students have Posted to the Newsgroup

A utility that will download posts from a newsgroup, newsarchiver.py, is attached to this document (the Wiki insists on appending .txt... just rename it). It will be wrapped by a program similar to the following:

#!/bin/bash

export PATH=`/bin/showpath gnu standard`
cd /u/cs135/newsgroup
./newsarchiver.py uw.cs.cs135 >/dev/null
tmpfile=a0_late.$$
realfile=a0_late
grep '^From: ' `grep -l '^References: $' *`\
        | perl -lne 'print $1 if /\<(.*?)@.*uwaterloo\.ca\>/' > $tmpfile
mv $tmpfile $realfile

Changes that can/should likely be made include:

• Using #!/usr/bin/env bash as the language; the Solaris /bin/bash is ancient, and a newer one will be selected from the PATH.
• Ensuring this script is in the same directory as newsarchiver.py (which it was anyway), so that the cd line should be able to be changed to the less fragile cd $(dirname $0).
• sed 's/late/done/g'? The marking script seems to look for done; this was likely a mid-term modification so students could continue submitting to the assignment after the deadline.
• Making the use of a command like whoami to avoid hard-coding in a particular course name.

The test.exe program can then take an action similar to the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
POSTS="/u/$course/newsgroup/a0_done"
if [ `grep $student $POSTS |  wc -w` -gt 0 ]; then 
        echo '100' >&3
        echo "The appropriate email address was used for a newsgroup post."
else
        echo '0' >&3
        echo "An e-mail from $student's uwaterloo address was not found on the newsgroup."
fi

This will need to be verified in BitterSuite once the proper facilities are built in...