Practice Questions

Author: Zoey Kitt

Question 1

Match the symbols with what they do:

  1. >
  2. <
  3. >>
  4. |
  5. 2>
  1. Pipe standard output from one program to another program’s standard input
  2. Redirect standard error output (in some shells)
  3. Redirect standard output to a file and overwrite it
  4. Redirect standard output to a file and append to it
  5. Redirect standard input to be from a file

Question 2

What is stored in file.txt after the following commands are run? Think about what each command does, and think back about getting help to figure out how you’d learn more about each. You may need to log on to Aviary to see the contents of /usr/share/dict/words.

echo "hello " > file.txt
head -10 /usr/share/dict/words | grep 's$' | wc -l >> file.txt