Using turnin to hand in electronic materials

turnin is a program for handing in electronic materials directly, rather than through email. It makes life a lot easier for everybody involved because it gives you a record of what was turned in and it organizes stuff well for us. (And it keeps everybody's email boxes smaller. Win.)

Here's a brief low-down on how to use turnin to deliver files. In this description [key] stands for the turnin key string (e.g., cs429-529.hw1), while [file(s)] stands for the name(s) of the file(s) you wish to turn in.

  1. Be sure that you're logged on to one of the CS department computers. (If you don't have a CS department account, please go see the CS support folks in FEC307 or send mail to cssupport@cs.unm.edu. They can set you up.)
  2. Create whatever files you want to deliver. Be sure that your files are (temporarily) in a world-readable directory. (Note It used to be necessary that your files were in a world readable place. Quick tests indicate that you might be able to get away without this step now, and just work from a private directory. Try the latter, but do the former if that doesn't work for you.)
  3. From a command-line prompt, run the command:
    turnin [key] [file(s)]
  4. To verify that you successfully turned in your materials, run the command:
    turnin -ls [key]
  5. Move your files to a non-world readable location. (To keep them from leaking out to some student who is less scrupulous than you are, of course.)
Here's an example of one way that you could use it to turn in three files, foo.c, bar.pdf, and baz.dat to the assignment cs429-529.hw1:
# create foo.c, bar.pdf, and baz.dat

> mkdir /tmp/$USER

> mkdir /tmp/$USER/submit

> cp foo.c bar.pdf baz.dat /tmp/$USER/submit

> chmod go+rx /tmp/$USER/submit

> cd /tmp/$USER/submit

> turnin cs429-529.hw1 foo.c bar.pdf baz.dat
Turning in:
foo -- ok
bar -- ok
bar -- ok
All done.

> turnin -ls cs429-529.hw1 .:
total 0
-rw-rw---- 1 terran faculty 1234 Jan 31 17:15 bar.pdf
-rw-rw---- 1 terran faculty 300 Jan 31 17:15 baz.dat
-rw-rw---- 1 terran faculty 789 Jan 31 17:15 foo.c

> rm -r /tmp/$USER/submit

For HW1, I will accept things by email (or paper, of course), if you have trouble with this process, but I strongly prefer you to use turnin. For future assignments, I will require turnin for all electronic submissions.