Student Manual

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Pretor User's Manual

For Students

Contents
1

2

Introduction

1.1 What is Pretor? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2 What is a PSF? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using

2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4

1
1.1

pretor-psf

Preparing Your Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Generating a PSF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Specifying Your Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4.1 ERROR: '. . ./pretor.toml' does not exist, refusing to generate
2.4.2 ERROR: . . . was not specified. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4.3 ERROR: output file '. . .' exists, refusing to overwrite . . . . .

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Introduction
What is Pretor?

Pretor is a grading assistant program which makes programming assignments easier for students and for
instructors. From the perspective of student users of Pretor, a primary advantage is that Pretor will handle
packing up your assignments for submission. Gone are the days of guessing what format your professor wants
your assignment in, or debating between tar cvfz project1.tgz project1/ and tar cvfz project1.tgz
project1/*. When you pack your submissions with Pretor, you can rest assured that your professor will
have no diculty grading your code.
1.2
PSF

What is a PSF?

stands for "Pretor Submission File". These are produced and interacted with by executing the

pretor-psf command (more on that later). A PSF contains all the code or other materials you may

have written for a given assignment, and also contains metadata such as your user or group ID, section
number, course, semester, and so on. A PSF is readable as a zip le, so simply keeping the PSF you turned
in for a given assignment is a great way to archive your work for future reference.
while a PSF le may be read as a zip le, you should not attempt to
create your own using a zip archiving tool - submissions not generated with the
pretor-psf command will be missing information required for grading.
Remember

1

2 USING PRETOR-PSF

2

Using pretor-psf

2.1

Preparing Your Project

Before you can create a PSF le, you must place a pretor.toml le in the top-level directory of your project.
The pretor.toml le contains information about how your PSF le should be packed. Your professor will
provide an appropriate pretor.toml for each assignment.
each assignment will have a dierent pretor.toml, be careful not
to mix-and match between assignments. In other words, the pretor.toml for
Assignment 1 can not be interchanged with the one for Assignment 2.
Remember

As an example, consider the project structure shown in gure 1. We would place the pretor.toml le
in the highest directory of the project, as a peer to the Makele and README, as shown in gure 2. Keep
in mind that this is simply an example for a hypothetical C-based project; your project structure may be
dierent depending on your course, professor, language, and development environment.
./

./

Makefile
README.txt
doc/
manual.pdf
src/
main.c
utils.c
utils.h

Makefile
README.txt
pretor.toml
doc/
manual.pdf
src/
main.c
utils.c
utils.h

Figure 1: Sample project structure before adding
pretor.toml.
Figure 2: Sample project structure after adding
pretor.toml.
2.2

Generating a PSF

: when you see monospaced text prexed with a $ symbol, this shows a
command that you should run in a terminal. for example, $ echo hello means
you should type "echo hello" into your terminal and press enter.

Hint

Now that you have a project ready to submit with a pretor.toml placed correctly in the project's root
directory, let's generate a submission le.
First, cd into your project directory:
$ cd /path/to/project
Now, call pretor-psf to pack up your project.
$ pretor-psf --create

An example output of this command for a user named cad might be:
INFO:
INFO:
INFO:
INFO:
INFO:

creating PSF...
reading data from .
generating metadata...
writing output...
PSF written to '/home/cad/Desktop/Fall 2019-CSCE313-1-cad-Assignment 1.psf'

c 2019 Charles A. Daniels

pretor 0.0.3-dev

2

2 USING PRETOR-PSF
2.3

2.3 Specifying Your Group

Specifying Your Group

By default, the group ID stored in your assignment le is simply the username you are logged into your
computer with. In the case of group projects, or if you need to specify a student ID which is dierent from
the username of the logged in user, you may do so by specifying the --group ag. For example, if you were
part of the group "group1", you might run the command:
$ pretor-psf --create --group group1
Hint

: you can heck the group ID that generated a PSF le with the command $

pretor-psf --metadata --input SOME_FILE.psf

2.4
2.4.1

Troubleshooting

ERROR: '. . ./pretor.toml' does not exist, refusing to generate PSF

If you encounter this error message, then there are two possibilities:
• You have run pretor-psf from the wrong directory, cd to your project directory and try again.
• You forgot to add an appropriate pretor.toml to your project directory.
2.4.2

ERROR: . . . was not specified.

This error message suggests that your pretor.toml le is present, but may be missing information. Make
sure that you are using the pretor.toml provided by your professor, and that you have followed any special
instructions your professor may have provided.
2.4.3

ERROR: output file '. . .' exists, refusing to overwrite

This error message indicates that the target output le that pretor-psf would generate already exists. If
you denitely want to replace this le, you can either move or delete it, or you can use the --force ag to
pretor-psf, which will cause it to overwrite the le.

c 2019 Charles A. Daniels

pretor 0.0.3-dev

3



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