Chapter 7 Exercises

Hello again! As I stated in my previous post, our current assignment is to read TOS Chapter 7 and do some  of the exercises. After reading over the chapter before beginning the actual assignment was helpful because I got the opportunity to get a grasp on what was being discussed before I actually did it. Even though I had already used the diff command before, I got to learn how to do some things with the command that I never knew how to do before. For example, with the diff command, you are able to not only compare one file to another, but also compare files in directories if needed. I didn't have too much trouble follow along with the step by step walkthrough of creating patches.

We were assigned Exercises 7.2.2, 7.8 and 7.9.
Exercise 7.2.2 wasn't too difficult, after following along in the previous section, this exercise was actually fairly easy.  The way that exercise 7.8 is worded is a little confusing to me, so it took me a while to do that one. I understand the concept of patches and how to create them, but the wording has me thrown off slightly. What I wound up doing (hopefully it's correct) was creating a file named bar with something in it and then copying it and its contents into a file names foo. I then ran the diff command with it's contents being sent into a file called foo-bar.patch. To be sure I was reading things correctly, I even read the question aloud to some folks to see how they interpreted it. Most interpreted it my way, so I stuck with it :).
Exercise 7.9 was a little more extensive so it took me the most time of the three. It wasn't any more difficult, however, because the step by step instructions given made it pretty clear what needed to be done. I was able to get everything to work properly.

Our team is now on our way to getting the rest of our semester planned. We have a few ideas on how we would like to contribute and will be posting them on our team wiki as we figure them out.