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Electronic Submission Guidelines - CSCI 200L, Spring 2012

 
Please use the BlackBoard system for electronic submission of your programming homework assignments.

Please see the Submission section of each homework assignment regarding how you should prepare a single gzipped tarfile for submission.

If for some reasons you cannot use BlackBoard to submit your assignment, you can e-mail the instructor and include the submission file as an e-mail attachment. In this case, the timestamp for the submission will be the time the e-mail arrive at the instructor's gmail account and not the sending time of your e-mail (since that can be easily forged). Therefore, if you do this, you will be doing this at your own risk! We will not be responsible if the Internet decides to take a very long time to deliver your e-mail.

Finally, do not create a RAR file and submit it or submit individual files. You will lose 20% of your grade if your submission is in the RAR format or if you e-mail individual files as your submission. The recommended file format is .tar.gz. A ZIP file containing all the proper files is also acceptable.

 
Verify Your Submission
After you submitted your assignment, you should verify what you've submitted can be compiled as is on aludra.usc.edu/nunki.usc.edu.
  1. Go to the homework page on BlackBoard
  2. Download the file you have just uploaded
  3. Copy the file to aludra.usc.edu/nunki.usc.edu
  4. On aludra/nunki
    1. Unpack the file (see example below)
    2. Compile your code (as instructed in your "compile.txt" file)
    3. Test your code

Example of Verifying Your Submission

Below, we use hw1 as an example. You should change hw1 to the appropriate name for your assignments.

Let's say your hw1.tar.gz is in your ~ (home) directory. Do the following on aludra.usc.edu/nunki.usc.edu:

    % cd ~
    % mkdir xyzzy
    % cd xyzzy
    % gunzip -c ../hw1.tar.gz > hw1.tar
    % tar xvf hw1.tar
    % [ check to make sure that all the files are there ]
    % [ use the instruction in your "compile.txt" to compile your hw1 ]
    % cd ..
    % rm -rf xyzzy
Before you run the mkdir command, make sure you don't have the xyzzy directory. If you do, delete it before you proceed.

A few things to note:

  1. If the gunzip command failed, the hw1.tar.gz file your've submitted is not properly gzipped.
  2. If the tar command failed, the hw1.tar.gz file your've submitted is not properly created.
  3. If by following the instruction in your "compile.txt" file failed to create your program, the grader will try different procedures to get your program to compile and will deduct up to 10% of the grade depending on how difficult it is to get your program to compile. If your program cannot be compiled because you forgot to include a file in your submission, we will not be allowed to take a file after the submission deadline and you will receive a score of zero.
  4. If any of the above failure occurs, you must recreate your submission and submit again and verify again. Please remember that, if you forget to submit a file, we cannot accept a file after the submission deadline (no matter what the file timestamp is on aludra/nunki or on your personal machine) and your assignment most likely will end up with a score of zero.
 
Using BlackBoard
The following video takes through the steps for submitting an assignment and reviewing your submission history. The video is on Lynda.com so you need to login through USC to get access to the content:
  1. Click on "Login to Lynda.com button" on the following page:
    http://www.usc.edu/its/lynda
  2. After you're logged into Lynda.com, go to the following URL:
    http://www.lynda.com/Blackboard-9-0-tutorials/Blackboard-9-x-Essential-Training-for-Students/84527-2.html
  3. The video you want is in section 3, labelled: "Uploading and submitting an assignment."
 

[Last updated Sat Sep 19 2020]    [Please see copyright regarding copying.]