Communication Tools
for Online Collaboration

Archiving the Webboards


A presentation at the American Psychological Association's
1999 Miniconvention on Education and Technology

Paula Edmiston       Georgia Tech Research Institute


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Brief List of Steps to Archive

Make sure you're in the group 1 directory. You can check your path using the pwd command. You want to see group1 as the last entry in the path. Then enter this series of commands

  1. cd 99spring
  2. mkdir mar-may
  3. cd mar-may
  4. cd ../../wwwboard.* .
  5. mkdir messages
  6. cd messages
  7. cd ../../../messages/* .
  8. Then strip the board!

A Descriptive Guide to Archiving the Boards

Make sure you're in the group1 directory.
At the UNIX prompt enter the pwd command and see the group1 is the last entry in the path.

cd 99spring
move into the 99spring directory, which already exists.

mkdir mar-may
this makes the archive directory

cd mar-may
step into that directory

cd ../../wwwboard.* .
this copies the 2 files, wwwboard.html and wwwboard.cgi
The ../../ means "reach up two dir levels" so the command literally says: CoPy from two levels up (../../) the files that begin "wwwboard" and I don't care how the filenames end ".*" and place the copies right here (the last "." dot in the command)

mkdir messages
still in the mar-may dir, I say create a dir named 'messages'

cd messages
step into the messages directory

cd ../../../messages/* .
copy from the group1 dir, the contents of the messages dir and place the copies "here" (the single dot at the end). So you see I had to reach up THREE levels up now that I'm down in messages dir.

I'm in group1/99spring/mar-may/messages

The message files are in group1/messages

So counting up the dir path, one level up takes me to mar-may
another level takes me up to 99spring
and the third level takes me up to group1

remember, 2 dots refer to the "above" dir and one dot refers to the "current" dir

Copy command syntax always says
copy from "somewhere" the file foo and put the copy "somewhere" (often "here", signified with a dot. What a lot of sound and fury!)

Then strip the board!



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