Simple Bash Tool to compare Challenge solvers

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Wed Apr 25, 2012 1:01 pm

i wrote a simple set of bash scripts to compare Challenge solvers. it might be useful to you if:
- you want to find out which challenges were solved by your competitors, but not by yourself
- you want to know who solved a particular challenge out of your watchlist
- you want to know if hints in the forum are given by someone who solved the challenge or not
- you want to compare top ten users

The tool is available at:
git clone git://git.code.sourceforge.net/p/gpu/gpu-freedom gpu-freedom
ln -s gpu_freedom/src/playground/discochal discochal
cd discochal

The tool works in Cygwin under Windows and should work on any Linux flavour with bash (tested on Fedora 16).

To use it do
cd discochal
chmod 755 *.sh
./updatechals.sh # this can take up to 5 hours
./discochal.sh yourusername
./diffchal.sh yourusername dangermouse
./watched.sh
./whosolved.sh Anybody

and don't forget to read the README file

hope you have fun

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Wed Apr 25, 2012 5:07 pm

Wow, that looks brilliant - I'll have a look! Thanks for this

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Wed Apr 25, 2012 9:06 pm

Hi,
I found a small bug:
In /removeif0.sh, the second line, beginning with FILESIZE, should be changed to read:

Code: Select all

FILESIZE=$(du -k "$1" | awk '{print $1}')

I have no idea how stat works (in the original), but apparently it doesn't take a -c flag (as of the version I've got, anyway, which is at least younger than 2009). Using du works fine.
Great tool, though!

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Thu Apr 26, 2012 7:33 am

hey laz0r thx for the fix, your approach with FILESIZE is more general, as du still works for me! btw another minor bug in diffchall.sh is that the challenge count is always one bigger than it should. This because i simply add the line count with wc -l in discochal.sh, and the line count is one too high because of the line "Challenge solved by user". But i'd like to keep this line for clearness, as it shows the direction of the diff.

About the invalid challenges, in fact adum already added an "invalid challenge" message, e.g see
http://www.hacker.org/challenge/solvers.php?id=350
To date i hardcoded challenge 303 in discochal.sh and updatechals.sh, maybe i should create a configuration file with a MAX_CHALLS variable and then "source" it...

ah, another feature is that discochal.sh can be run concurrently, as it is written "thread-safe".

to be honest i am a bit of a bash newbie! ciao

UPDATE: i released a new package under http://www.gpu-grid.net/other/discochal2.tar.gz incorporating the fix of laz0r, the challenge count fix and the MAX_CHALLS constant. There is a new script updateusers.sh to update users in the watchlist and a script updatesinglechal.sh to update a single challenge. This time, i did not include the "database" of solvers though... so you might still need to download the first package, or to run updatechals.sh first...

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 7:18 am

I did a third release under http://www.gpu-grid.net/other/discochal3.tar.gz
removing the annoying h2 html tag and fixing some duplicate user issues. If you already have data, you need to run an ./updateusers.sh to get rid of the h2 tags and to get ./diffchall.sh to work properly.

I put the thing also somewhere in a git repository:
git clone git://git.code.sourceforge.net/p/gpu/gpu-freedom gpu-freedom
ln -s gpu_freedom/src/playground/discochal discochal
cd discochal

run git pull from time to time to see if there are updates...

ciao

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 8:03 am

Brilliant - I'll have a look later today

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 9:06 am

ah laz0r, the data in the original package discochal.tar.gz is a bit corrupted (i created it from a virtual machine running on VirtualBox with poor internet connection), so you might need take your time and run a ./updatechals.sh to get reliable information on solvers... For the occasional user, the provided data should be still okay, though.

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 4:52 pm

I think it would be good if the script checked on running updatechals whether the solvers folder existed - you could just run "mkdir solvers" at the start of the code, as a little bodge job!

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Fri Apr 27, 2012 9:06 pm

ciao laz0r, thanks again for pointing me at this. i had the directory, but cleanup.sh in combination with git removed the directory. i rereleased discochal3.tar.gz with the mkdir thing, as you proposed! discochal3.tar.gz now includes a complete uncorrupted solvers database updated as of 27.4.2012