School of Computer Science, McGill University
COMP-206 Introduction to Software Systems, Winter 2021
Final Project
Due Date April 29, 14:00 EST
This is an individual assessment. You need to solve these questions on your own. Instructors
and TAs will only provide clarifications on the exam questions and it will be through Piazza. There
will be no help provided to debug your project code. This is your final work, and it also requires you
to demonstrate that you have learned the necessary debugging skills.
Obtaining a minimum of 50% in this project is mandatory to pass the course (in addition to ob-
taining an overall passing grade across all the course assessments). Students who do not achieve that
threshold will receive an F grade. NO LATE submissions are accepted. Please account for Internet
delays, outages, etc., and turn in your work in due time. These are not valid excuses for extensions.
This project description is for your personal use only. Sharing it with others, including websites, helping o
seeking help from others for your project work will be deemed as copyright violation and plagiarism. Such actions
will result in an automatic forfeit of your course grade to F in addition to any University disciplinary proceedings.
You may leverage the course materials, solutions, etc., given to you, as well as parts of your own assignment solutions
for your project implementation.
If you use concepts and snippets of code from other sources such as websites, they will have to be documented in
your code as a proper comment. Lack of such citation will also be treated as plagiarism. In any case, utilizing such
external resources must be limited to bare syntactical references (e.g - how to include a backslash - \ symbol in sed
pattern) and should not result in you copying the major part of your program logic from such resources (e.g. - how do
I traverse a linked list). Both software and manual mechanisms will be employed for plagiarism detection.
You MUST use mimi.cs.mcgill.ca to create the solution to this project. You must not use you
Mac command-line, Windows command-line, nor a Linux distro installed locally on your laptop. You can access
mimi.cs.mcgill.ca from your personal computer using ssh or putty and also transfer files to your computer using
filezilla or scp as seen in class and in Lab A and mini assignment 1.
Instructors/TAs upon their discretion may ask you to demonstrate/explain your solution. No points are awarded
for commands that do not compile/execute at all. (Commands that execute, but provide inco
ect behavio
output
will be given partial marks.) All questions are graded proportionally. This means that if 40% of the question is
co
ect, you will receive 40% of the grade.
Please read through the entire project description before you start working on it. You can loose
several points for not following the instructions. Points can be deducted for violating the constraints set forth
in the questions, including for the steps where an explicit deduction is not specified. It will also help you get the
igger picture of the project. There are also some helpful hints given at the end of this document that can be useful
to you. Go through the checklist at the end to ensure that you have turned in all the required files. Files that are
not turned-in will not be given a second chance.
The total points allocated to this project is 25.
Project Synopsis
For your final project, you will implement a software solution that consists of shell scripts and C program to compute
the lab attendance associated with each student.
1
Exercise 1 - Version Control (2 Points)
Create a local git repository (private) in your home directory. You will be using this for the rest of your final project
work to write any shell scripts, C programs, etc. DO NOT use public repositories such as github.
We expect to see at the least 4 commits, each of which are at the least 10 minutes (or more) apart. So commit
your work frequently as you reach some logical milestone of your project work. No points will be allocated fo
this exercise unless this requirement is completely met. You must turn in your git log command output
copied
edirected as git.txt file, once you have finished your complete project work.
Exercise 2 - A Shell Script to Pre-process the Information in the CSV
Files. (6 Points)
At the end of a lab session, TAs will download a CSV file that contains the attendance information recorded by
zoom into their respective folders. Let us start by taking a peak at the directory. The output below is truncated fo
evity.
$ tree LabAttendance
LabAttendance
|-- lab1
| |-- lab-A.csv
| |-- lab-B.csv
........
| |-- lab-I.csv
...
|-- lab3
| |-- Lab-A.csv
...
|-- lab4
| |-- LAB-A.csv
......
| |-- LAB-I.csv
|
|-- lab5
......
|-- lab6
...
|-- lab7
|-- lab-a.csv
...
|-- lab-i.csv
As we can see, each of the seven lab groups (1 through 7) has an attendance file for each of the nine labs (A
through I). While the CSV filename conventions are consistent, their case (uppercase/lowercase) can be in different
combinations depending on how the TA named their files.
Next, let us take a peek into some of these CSV files. (These are synthetic data, not actual student names).
$ head -3 lab1/lab-A.csv
Name (Original Name),User Email,Total Duration (Minutes),Guest
Sharda Freedman, XXXXXXXXXX,64,No
Sterling Boone, XXXXXXXXXX,64,No
$ head -3 lab5/Lab-A.csv
Name (Original Name),User Email,Join Time,Leave Time,Duration (Minutes),Guest
Mack Boyd, XXXXXXXXXX,01/21/2021 08:58:30 PM,01/21/2021 10:17:06 PM,79,No
Chung Ti
s,chung.ti
XXXXXXXXXX,01/21/2021 08:58:31 PM,01/21/2021 10:03:25 PM,65,No
2
The CSV files have can have one of two possible formats (each file follows one or the other and not a mix). The
second format contains the join time and leave time as extra attributes compared to the first format.
Your first task is to collect the information from all these CSV files and build a consolidated CSV file that contains
the records in a common format.
1. Create a shell script fixformat.sh to do this task. You can use any shell/Unix commands already available
in mimi to implement this script (other than sorting).
2. The shell script expects two arguments, the first being the directory under which it should recursively search
for the CSV files that follows the naming convention mentioned above. You should find such CSV files no
matter under which subdirectory they are stored in (i.e., subdirectory names and depths should not influence
the outcome). In other words, even if we add a new lab group, etc., it should not impact your script. You
shell script’s objective must be to look for the CSV files that follow the naming convention anywhere unde
that directory hierarchy. The second argument is the CSV file into which the script will store the re-formatted
(and consolidated) output that it processed from all the input CSV files. Either of these arguments could be
absolute or relative paths.
3. (1 Point) If the shell script is not invoked with sufficient arguments, display a usage message and terminate
with code 1.
$ ./fixformat.sh
Usage fixformat.sh
$ echo $?
1
4. (1 Point) If the first argument is not a name of an existing directory, the script should throw an e
or message
and terminate with code 1.
$ ./fixformat.sh /data/LabAttendance /data/labdata.csv
E
or /data/LabAttendance is not a valid directory
5. Do not create an output file in the e
o
usage situations described above. (-1 Points).
6. (4 Points) When invoked co
ectly, the script will find all the CSV files under the given directory hierarchy
that follows the naming convention (mentioned previously), reformat the information and consolidate them
into a single output CSV file, after which it will terminate with code 0.
$ ./fixformat.sh /data/LabAttendance /data/labdata.csv
$ echo $?
0
A sample of the output is given below.
$ head -3 /data/labdata.csv
User Email,Name (Original Name),Lab,Total Duration (Minutes)
XXXXXXXXXX,Usha Rush,D,64
XXXXXXXXXX,Bessie Thompson,D,58
There is a header at the top of the file, followed by the actual information records. The shell script has done
the following transformations.
(a) For each record, it included only the email, name and duration information from the original CSV files.
(b) To each record, it added a new column, Lab, which it derived from the name of each CSV file and added
to the records that it read from that CSV file (the values of this column represents the labs A through I).
The values for this column should be uppercase alphabets i
espective of the case of the CSV filenames.
The output produced by your shell script should follow the same exact formatting (order of columns, etc.).
There is no particular order in which the actual attendance information records are to be stored in the CSV
file. Deliberately sorting attendance records when producing the output is not allowed and can
esult in a 0 for this exercise. That will be the task of the C program in the next exercise.
3
7. Existing output files must be overwritten by your script (not appended).
8. You need not handle any other e
o
failure situations other than those mentioned above.
9. You do not have to handle conditions where a directory may not have any relevant CSV files or the CSV files
not having headers
ecords (i.e, any file that matches the naming convention will be valid CSV files).
Exercise 3 - A C Program to Compute the Attendance. (10 Points)
Now that we have done some preliminary cleaning of the attendance data, it is time to compute the attendance
associated with each student. At a high level, first we need to figure out for each student how much time (duration)
they attended a lab. Keep in mind that even for a given lab, (say lab D) a student may have multiple
ecords. This is because the student might have got disconnected and had to connect back (which results in multiple
zoom records for the same meeting). Another reason could be that the student could only attend part of the lab fo
their group (say lab 2) and had to catchup on another TA’s lab (say lab 5). In all of these cases, our objective is to
find the net amount of time (duration) that the student spent on a given lab (say lab D).
1. Use vim to create C program files labapp.c, zoomrecs.c, zoomrecs.h and a makefile. You are not allowed
to create any