Turnin - A Program for submitting class materials

turnin is a program installed on the UNM instructional machines (e.g. moons.cs.unm.edu) for submitting class materials for grading. It provides a simple interface, but requires careful use of permissions to turn in assignments.

To turn in assignments with turnin, a user must have all the files he seeks to turn in, as well as the name of the assignment as set up by the instructor. This name is typically of the form “classname.assignname”, for example cs151.assign1. To turn file a.c, b.c, and Makefile for the assignment cs151.assign1, a user simply runs:

turnin cs151.assign1 a.c b.c Makefile

This command will then copy each of the selected files to a user-specific directory for turning in those files. You may see a list of turned-in files by using the -ls option to turnin, for example by running:

turnin -ls cs151.

Similarly, you may delete turned-in files by supplying the -rm option to turnin, for example:

turnin -rm cs151 a.c

Because turnin runs as a setuid program to be able to copy files to a priviledged turnin directory, you must be a little careful with the permissions of the files you are turning in and the directory that contains them. In particular:

1. The directory that you run turnin from must have world execute permission so that hte turnin program can search for programs in it
2. The files in that directory must be world readable

Of course, you don't generally want to keep all of your files world readable to prevent others from reading/stealing them. So, to do this, I recommend you do the following steps:

1. Make a subdirectory under the directory containing the files you want to turn in, and make *that* directory world searchable 2. Copy all of the files you want to turn in to that directory and verify that all of the files you need to turn in are in that directory 3. Make all of the copied files in that subdirectory world readable 4. Turnin those files 5. Make that directory and its contents no longer world readable/searchable.

As an example, that would mean doing something like this:

bridges@phoebe> ls
a.c  b.c  Makefile
bridges@phoebe> mkdir submitted
bridges@phoebe> chmod a+X Makefile
bridges@phoebe> cp a.c b.c Makefile submitted
bridges@phoebe> chmod a+r submitted/*
bridges@phoebe> cd submitted
bridges@phoebe> turnin cs151.assign1.jacobi a.c b.c Makefile
Turning in:
 a.c -- ok
 b.c -- ok
 Makefile -- ok
All done.
bridges@phoebe> turnin -ls cs151.assign1
.:
total 0
-rw-rw---- 1 bridges ssg 0 Oct 21  2009 Makefile
-rw-rw---- 1 bridges ssg 0 Oct 21  2009 a.c
-rw-rw---- 1 bridges ssg 0 Oct 21  2009 b.c
bridges@phoebe> cd ..
bridges@phoebe> chmod go-rX submitted