Placement Test: Unix and Bitcoin

JWRD Computing, February 2020

This exercise is to asses your knowledge in several general areas as well as specific tools of interest, in order to establish a basis for learning at the appropriate level. Fill in the blanks to the best of your ability, taking no more than 30 minutes.

1. The _______________ is the program that runs on login, interprets commands, and executes other programs.
2. Absolute paths are distinguished from relative paths by a leading _______________ character.
3. Relative paths are interpreted relative to the _______________ directory of a process.
4. The privileged or "superuser" account in Unix is named _______________.
5. The _______________ command removes empty directories.
6. Manual pages can be viewed using the _______________ command.
7. To show a detailed listing including hidden files, issue the _______________ command.
8. A plain text file consists of a sequence of _______________ conforming to a given encoding.
9. There are _______________ bits in a byte.
10. Two types of filesystem links are _______________ and _______________.
11. Trees and DAGs are examples of graphs which contain no _______________.
12. Two primary modes in the "vi" editor are _______________ and _______________.
13. The "vi" command to save the file and quit is _______________.
14. An abbreviation for the current user's home directory is the _______________ character.
15. A double dot (..) as a path component represents the _______________ directory.
16. An example of a pager program is _______________.
17. To redirect output of a program into a file, use the _______________ operator.
18. To use the output of a program as input for another, use the _______________ operator.
19. The character to direct the "tar" program to extract an archive is _______________.
20. To mark a script as executable, use the _______________ command.
21. To check free space in a filesystem, use the _______________ command.
22. To search the contents of a file or stream by regular expression, use the _______________ command.
23. To search in "vi" or "less", use the _______________ key.
24. An example of a "sed" command is _______________ which performs _______________.
25. _______________ is a Unix command and programming language oriented toward processing tabular text files.
26. An example of a shell wildcard character is _______________.
27. To substitute the value of a shell variable, use the _______________ character.
28. To prevent the shell from processing metacharacters, a string can be _______________.
29. Unlike local shell variables, _______________ variables are inherited by child processes (exported).
30. To list running processes, use the _______________ command.
31. The _______________ command displays the kernel log buffer.
32. The _______________ command checks the structural integrity of a filesystem.
33. To connect a new filesystem at a given path in the virtual filesystem, use the _______________ command.
34. _______________ linking combines all necessary code into a single binary with no library dependencies.
35. Differential or incremental backup strategies achieve greater efficiency at the cost of _______________.
36. The _______________ command displays or modifies network interface configuration.
37. An example of a network troubleshooting command is _______________.
38. Many Unix software packages are compiled according to Makefiles using the _______________ command.
39. A common program providing secure connection to a remote shell is _______________.
40. A program for multiplexing or detaching terminal sessions is _______________.
41. A command for computing a cryptographic checksum (hash) of one or more files is _______________.
42. To configure terminal driver settings, such as for a serial port, use the _______________ command.
43. An example of a program to connect to a remote system over a serial port is _______________.
44. The command to control a "daemontools" service is _______________.
45. In "daemontools", the "supervise" program will _______________ a service if it aborts.
46. To create a new Linux ext4 filesystem, use the _______________ command.
47. The stream compression program associated with the ".gz" extension is _______________.
48. The _______________ route is used for packet destinations lacking a more specific route.
49. Filtering based on established network connections requires a _______________ firewall.
50. A program to create a patch file describing the differences between two text files is _______________.
51. Three fundamental operations provided by the GPG toolset are _______________, _______________, and _______________.
52. Reputation is established around a cryptographic identity in a Web of _______________.
53. To list available commands (RPCs) for a running Bitcoin node, use the _______________ command.
54. The "bitcoind" command to check basic status such as balance and block count is _______________.
55. The "bitcoind" configuration file is _______________.
56. In the Bitcoin data directory, the full blockchain is kept in "blk####.dat" files while the index database is kept in _______________.
57. The approximate size of the Bitcoin blockchain as of 2020 is _______________ (to an order of magnitude).
58. There are _______________ satoshi in one bitcoin.
59. Lacking a central authority, the transaction history of Bitcoin is defended by proof of _______________ ("mining"), measured in _______________ per second.
60. Many cryptographic operations require a source of strong _______________ ("randomness").
61. In the IBM PC architecture, the _______________ is loaded from ROM and executed to perform system initialization prior to the operating system bootloader.
62. Overwriting the contents of a ROM chip is known as _______________.