Bash & Customer Support Mini Challenges

• Challenge 1: The Shell
• Challenge 2: Customer support
• Challenge 3: 1 minute typing test

Challenge 1 - The Shell

Pretend you have just received the following emails from a user named "Jane" asking for help with Fig/shell related issues. Write an example response to each. Please submit in a markdown/word/textedit doc

Questions

1. How do I change my default shell from bash to zsh?

2. How can I customise my prompt such that:

   1. It says my current working directory but only the folder name not the full path (e.g. if I'm on my desktop, make it just say Desktop not ~/desktop. If I'm in my home directory, make it say ~ not your name (e.g. brendan)
   2. If I'm in a git repo, it should additionally say the current branch I am on, but if am not in a git repo, it should say nothing
   3. BONUS: How can I make the git branch be bold and coloured green?

   

3. How can I have my shell automatically alternate printing out either "First line" or "Second line" just before a new prompt loads.

   1. Hints: 1. you will want to look into zsh's precmd hook + storing state with environment variables. 2. Assume the user has already defined precmd somewhere

4. I have a file on my desktop called [test.sh](http://test.sh) which contains just one line: echo hello world. But when I run ./test.sh it says zsh: permission denied: ./test.sh. How do I get this working?
5. I just installed brew on my new Mac M1 and it asked me to put /opt/homebrew/bin  in my path. What does this mean and how do I do it?

Bonus Question

I have a LOT of files on my desktop. I want to find all the files on my desktop that contain the phrase "hello world"

1. What command can I run that just lists the files that contain "hello world"?
2. What command can I run that lists the files that contain "hello world" and for each file, the line that contains "hello world" AND the lines 5 lines before and 5 lines after that line

(This last one may be a little harder but I want to see how you do. If you can’t do it, no worries. If you need help please email)

Hints for structuring your response

1. Keep your email short and simple! No one wants to read a long email
2. Use single backticks when referencing a small code block e.g. `cd desktop`
3. Use tripe backticks when referencing a longer code block e.g.

```
git add .
```

4. Remember, you’re pretending to respond to a user asking these questions. Be nice and friendly!

Hints for understanding the shell

• For colors, look up ANSI escape sequences
• Look up "zsh hooks"

Evaluation Criteria

• Correct and working answers
• Clear and simple communication
• Empathy with user

Challenge 2 - Customer Support

Could you please just answer these quick questions for us:

1. As a support engineer, you will help maintain our public issues repository on GitHub. What makes a well maintained issues repo?
2. Every time a user submits our uninstall feedback form, we receive an email. The feedback form usually tells us why they uninstalled. As part of being a support engineer, you will try and upsell users who have uninstalled into redownloading it. In what cases is it appropriate to do this?

Challenge 3 - Typing Test

Could you please take this 1 min typing speed test: https://www.typing.com/student/typing-test/1-minute and screenshot your results?

Feel free to take it a couple of times. Don’t worry too much about accuracy (as long as it’s above 90% it’s probably fine).

We know typing speed doesn’t necessarily correlate with a successful customer support person. However, you will likely be interacting with a lot of users online so we are just interested in seeing how quickly you can type!

Submission

When you are done, please put your answers for challenge 1, 2, and 3 in separate files in a folder, zip the folder, and upload to: https://airtable.com/shrFwTaQFMqvzKYLX