Recruitment homework question

Simon — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:00:00 +0000

This is one of the homework questions that Digitalbrain has recently been giving out to prospective candidates for a Linux system administrator role.

Working with a large, complex application with many thousands of users, we very often have to manipulate significant amounts of textual data. Perhaps as part of a process to create new student accounts within a school, or to feed to one of our management tools to delete or relocate a collection of user files, or maybe to collate data from one of the many log files.

So this question is based on the kind of work that is a core (if not very interesting) part of the role. I would have expected it to be a core part of any Linux sysadmins knowledge too.

The question:

Attached is a CSV file (a sample from a much larger file). This file needs cleaning and altering in the following ways:-

capitalise the first letter of the two name fields
sanitise the formatting
move the username column to the beginning of each line
the phone number is missing the area code - look up the city in the following table, and add it to the beginning of the phone number column

City	Area Code
London	5
Brighton	6
Manchester	7

Please detail what you did, how, any scripts involved and provide the corrected CSV.

The CSV file

Our recent experience seems to suggest that being able to answer this is a rare skill, even for people who advertise themselves as experienced Linux system administrators (and are applying for such a job)!

Are we being unfair?

Are we expecting too much?

"Recruitment homework question" by Rus

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:54:26 +0000

People that can't solve this easy problem, suck, badly! PS. PHP isn't a solution.

Pither.com: Recruitment homework question

Recruitment homework question

"Recruitment homework question" by Rus