veltman / clmystery

A command-line murder mystery

The Command Line Murders

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There's been a murder in Terminal City, and TCPD needs your help.

To figure out whodunit, you need access to a command line.

Once you're ready, clone this repo, or download it as a zip file.

Open a Terminal, go to the location of the files, and start by reading the file 'instructions'.

One way you can do this is with the command:

cat instructions

(cat is a command that will print the contents of the file called instructions for you to read.)

To get started on how to use the command line, open cheatsheet.md or cheatsheet.pdf (from the command line, you can type 'nano cheatsheet.md').

Don't use a text editor to view any files except these instructions, the cheatsheet, and hints.

Credits

By Noah Veltman
Projects: noahveltman.com
GitHub: veltman
Twitter: @veltman

clmystery's Issues

Conclusion

This is awesome!
Great idea, and nice execution!

I felt like the conclusion was a little anti-climactic (unless I missed something). After figuring out the murderer's name it was sort of... "well, am i done now?"
Would have enjoyed more of a catch at the end of the chase.

But most importantly I learned some new commands and flags, so job well done 😀

Are you planning on continuing this project?

Detective Notepad++

I found that I wanted to store the output of my commands in order to track my progress.
Now this can be done easily by creating a new file and adding your command output to the file. The thing is it felt "contaminating" to do this inside the git repo as I might possible want to make changes for a pull request.

So I think it would be quite cool if you have a dedicated file to add your "notes" into and that will be ignored in a .gitignore file.

This will also teach people not familiar with the command line the ">>" append, which I saw is briefly mentioned in the cheatsheet.

Was great fun and can't wait to see how this game evolves.

Provide a way to check answer

Currently the only way to check your answer is to see the correct answer. Should provide a way to compare an answer against your guess and see whether it's right so you can keep working if it's wrong.

Solution check not working. ERROR: Illegal variable name.

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the awesome tutorial. It took me about 1 and a half hours to finish.

Yet I had the biggest trouble when I wanted to check my solution.

When executing the command, I only got the following respond.

Illegal variable name.

Being quite new to unix and the command line. This was too little for me to start debugging.
I thought I will report it ...

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it.
Best Regards,
egninge

Solution Error

Command for checking solution is resulting in an error.
grep: /dev/stdin: No such file or directory
SORRY, TRY AGAIN.
This is a picture of error in the Git Bash terminal, despite the correct answer being inputted into the command. cmlsolutionerror.jpg spoiler alert

Licensing?

I realise this may be a weird question, but I maintain an AUR package for Arch Linux for this project, and it'd greatly help if I knew under what terms it can be redistributed, or if it can be redistributed at all.

So I wondered if you'd given it any thought? GPL? Creative Commons? I'd also greatly appreciate it if you could include a LICENSE file in the repository I can optionally link to.

Thanks anyway!

Cheatsheat

In the last section of the cheatsheat "More than one way to skin a cat" the second and third example do have different outputs than the first exmple. Maybe they should be corrected. It works with "tail -n +8 ... " and the explanation could for example be corrected to "Print out everything starting with line 8, then print..." / "Save everything starting with line 8 to a temporary file, then...".

[SPOILERS] Command for checking solution doesn't work

Hi, on my system the command to check a solution does not work.

This is the command I'm executing (copied from the solution file):

[felix@sun clmystery]$ echo "[the answer]" | $(command -v md5 || command -v md5sum) | grep -qf /dev/stdin solution && echo CORRECT\! GREAT WORK, GUMSHOE. || echo SORRY, TRY AGAIN.

and the output is:

SORRY, TRY AGAIN.

while the command for revealing the solution outputs exactly the name I entered. This happens in both zsh and bash.

The .zip file is redundant

Including the .zip file of the entire repository in the repository itself is not a good practice. If the project history would extend further, the size of the repository history would rapidly grow. Over time, it would become also become nuisance to maintain (although a git pre-commit hook could be used to automate it), especially to outside contributors.

Consider removing the .zip file from the repo.

GitHub already offers the ability to download .zip files so it's not needed to support people that don't like or know git. Like this:
https://github.com/veltman/clmystery/archive/master.zip

There is a download link to that zipball in the side bar in the repository view.

Lot of missing streets

On my first play-through I seem to have hit a dead end.

From the clues I managed to derive a list of names of people I'd like to talk to, as I figure was the intention. But unfortunately it seems the very first person - and as it turn out, quite a lot of other people - are utter ghosts; the streets they live on are non-existing.

Given the sheer scale of this I'm assuming this is not some intricate part of the yet-to-uncovered plot.

I've derived a quick list of the 2541 street that are listed as someone's address in the people file, but does not exist in the streets folder, but given it's size I'll post this separately below.

German translation

Hey there,

just solved the game. Really nice idea!
I would love to translate it into German. Are you okay with this?

Best regards
Nick

Markdown to PDF

this issue isn't really related to clmystery, but i was curious which tools was used for creating the cheatsheet.pdf since it seems the pdf has been derived from the markdown file.

i thought it was pandoc but it's much fancier.

nice project btw^^
cheers Alex