Course/Putting It All Together/Terminal Confidence Check

Terminal Confidence Check

Final challenge: find hidden files, organize data, create directories, and build pipelines.

This is the final challenge. You have a challenge/ directory with a realistic project structure — nested folders, hidden files, data files, and more. Your mission has five objectives that draw from everything you've learned across all modules. There are no step-by-step instructions this time. You know enough to figure it out.
Here's what you need to accomplish:
  1. Find the hidden file — There's a file called .secret-key buried somewhere in the nested directories. Use ls -a or find to track it down.
  2. Create a new directory — Create a directory called challenge/results to store your work.
  3. Copy a file — Copy challenge/data.csv into your new challenge/results directory.
  4. Use piping — Use a pipe to process some data (for example, cat the CSV and grep for specific entries, or sort and uniq the data).
  5. Navigate deep — cd into the challenge/config/settings directory.
# Some commands that might help:
ls -la challenge/               # see what's inside (including hidden)
ls -aR challenge/               # recursive listing to find hidden files
find challenge/ -name ".*"      # find hidden files
mkdir challenge/results         # create a new directory
cp challenge/data.csv challenge/results/data.csv
cat challenge/data.csv | sort
cd challenge/config/settings
The five goals can be completed in any order. Take your time, explore the filesystem, and use everything you've learned. If you get stuck, try ls to look around, pwd to check where you are, and cd .. to back up.
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Remember: hidden files start with a dot (.) and only show up when you use ls -a. The find command with -name ".*" is a quick way to locate hidden files in a directory tree. Don't forget ls -aR for a recursive listing that includes hidden files.

WIN

On Windows, hidden files have a "hidden" attribute rather than a dot prefix. In PowerShell, Get-ChildItem -Force -Recurse reveals hidden items. In WSL, hidden files follow the Linux dot convention.

Practice