PersonalNote.md

This project inspired by what I learned from COMP1521. It was meant to act as a challenge, and to have a deeper understandings to content taught.

One special component of the course was this function called POSIX_SPAWN, which during the time I didn't necessarily grapple with the implementation for this. I felt because of my vague understanding of this function, I thought it was necessarily to use in a project!

Challenges:

Certain functionalities, I was unable to complete as it would either break other components or was not allowed for example, I would've liked the convenience of

// This is from man pages.
#define _XOPEN_SOURCE // This macro broke other functions.
#include <time.h>

char *strptime(const char *s, const char *format, struct tm *tm);

This macro as described

here

adds extra functionality that are only defined in X/Open POSIX standards, doing this by changing how libraries behave as described

here

Even though this convenience, would've slightly improved efficiency, it gave a deeper understanding on what is involved in this function, which is a benefit nonetheless.

There was another hurdle, that was hindered for some unknown reason, when you load an argument for grep as the following:

char *grepTerms = "Hello|Goodbye"
char *grepArgv[] = {"grep", "-E", "-l", "-w", grepTerms, "*.c", NULL};
if (posix_spawnp(&pid, grepArgv[0], &actions, NULL, grepArgv, environ) != 0) {
    perror("posix_spawnp");
    exit(1);
}

This would not work as grep mistook "*.c" as a file, I'm guessing that this functionality is only available on the command line. Where it would list out all the files containing "Hello" or "Goodbye" as a list of files. What I was thinking what we could do is process each of these files individually and remove them using our function findPaths. However in the end, this allowed me to redesign the code so that any file containing these words would be removed if they exist relative to the current directory.

Insightful:

Since we use time_t in a program, which is a typedef of long it is susceptible to the Year 2038 problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Which is also used in sys/stat.h library. Hopefully it is solved!

Thanks for reading and happy coding!