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

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?