Activity 1: The Hunt for the Maltese Python

Item
Week	Week 2, Wednesday
Type	In-class activity
Due	Week 2, Friday by 9am
Progress

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

A professor once hid a Maltese Python, a totem of unbelievable power, somewhere in a maze of directories. Being forgetful, they lost track of where they put it. Your job is to find it and bring it back to the cage.

You will not write any Python code in this activity. You will move around a file system using a terminal, which is the skill everything else this semester sits on top of.

Course learning outcomes

This activity addresses the following course learning outcome:

CLO 2. Implement code consistent with industry-standard practices using professional-grade integrated development environments (IDEs), command-line tools, and version control systems.

Specifically, by the end of this activity you should be able to:

• describe what a working directory is, and say which one you are in at any moment
• move up and down a directory tree with cd, including using ..
• list the contents of a directory with ls, including entries that begin with a dot
• run a program from the terminal and pass it an argument
• explain why a file being "hidden" is a convention rather than a security feature

Commands you will need

Command	Purpose
pwd	Print Working Directory: where am I right now
ls	List what is in this directory
ls -a	List all entries, including hidden ones that start with a dot
cd NAME	Change Directory into NAME
cd ..	Go up one directory, toward the root

Two more commands come with this repository:

Command	Purpose
uv run detect	Check the room you are standing in for a hidden passage
uv run capture FILENAME	Try to capture the python

detect takes no arguments. Run it from inside a directory. If that directory contains no hidden passage, it answers Nothing to see here. Might move on.... If it does contain one:

This room seems a bit drafty...

When you see that, there is a .hidden-passage in the room. It starts with a dot, so plain ls will not show it. Use ls -a, then cd into it.

capture takes one argument: the name of the file you think is the python. Run it from inside the directory that holds the file, not from somewhere else:

uv run capture maltese-python.png

It will only report success if you have actually found the right file.

What to do

1. Clone this repository and open a terminal in its folder.
2. Run pwd first. Read the output. That is where you are.
3. Explore. The house starts in src/. Use ls, cd, and cd .. to move around.
4. Use uv run detect in rooms that look like dead ends.
5. When you find the python, cd into the room it is in and capture it. capture puts a copy in the cage/ directory for you.

Tip

If you get lost, cd with no argument returns you to your home directory, which is probably not where you want to be. Better: run pwd, read it, and walk back up with cd .. until you recognize where you are. Getting lost and recovering is the actual skill here.

Evaluation

In-class activities are graded on completion and contribute to the In-Class Activities category on the syllabus (10 points, averaged across the semester). This activity is worth one activity grade.

Level	What it looks like
Complete	capture reported success, so cage/maltese-python.png exists, and you can retrace how you got there
Partial	You navigated the maze and found the hidden passage, but did not finish the capture
Incomplete	No meaningful navigation attempted

The automated check confirms one thing only: that cage/maltese-python.png exists. Run it yourself from your assignment's working directory, not from whatever room you were standing in when you captured the python. That is the top-level folder you land in right after cloning, for example .../assignment-maltese-python-starter:

uv run gatorgrade --config .gatorgrade.yml

Note

Automated results are preliminary. Your instructor sets the final grade.

Why this activity exists

Every lab after this one asks you to run commands in a terminal, in a specific directory, on files you have to find. Students who are shaky on cd and ls spend the rest of the semester fighting their tools instead of the actual problem. One class session spent getting genuinely comfortable here pays for itself many times over.