You will need access to a Unix shell for HPPS. Read the Unix software guide.
After reading and following the guide, open a terminal with a Unix shell. When illustrating a shell command, we will write it like this:
$ echo HPPS is my favourite course
HPPS is my favourite course
The $ is not part of the input you type, but a stand-in for the
command prompt. On the line after the command (the echo ... part),
we may put the output of the command. When we tell you to run a
command, we will often not show the output, but merely tell you to run
e.g:
$ echo HPPS is the favourite course of $USER
If you have no experience with using a command prompt, then you might want to read (part of) this text on Unix-Like Data Processing, which also contains some exercises. If you don't like this text, then the Internet contains thousands of tutorials and guides on how to use a Unix shell, all of which are a mere search engine away. You do not need to be a command prompt expert to succeed in HPPS, but you should understand the following:
-
The general tree structure of the file system.
-
How to move between directories (
cd) and see their contents (ls). -
How to view file contents from a command line (
cat,less, etc). -
How to copy files (
cp). -
How to move/rename files (
mv). -
How to delete files and directories (
rm).
You will be doing a lot of C programming in HPPS, so you need to make sure you can compile C code. You are not expected to understand what the C code does yet.
Copy the file guess.c to a directory on your computer, open
a Unix terminal, and navigate to the directory containing guess.c. Then run:
$ gcc guess.c -o guess
This will compile the C program and generate a binary called guess.
Now run the ./guess program and complete the game:
$ ./guess
OK, I am thinking of a number in the range [0,99] - see if you can guess it!
Type a number and press enter to make a guess.
42
Too high!
...
While you don't know C yet, you can still try the following (optional)
exercises to modify the guess.c program. Remember that you have to
re-run the gcc command after making a modification!
-
Make the program print a more insulting message when the player guesses wrong.
-
Change the range from which the random number is drawn.
-
Make the program cheat, so that it changes the number it is thinking of when it would otherwise have been guessed.