For CS 354, grades are stored in ~cs354/grades/$USER as text files that get updated when your grades are changed. Thus there are no automatic notifications like with Brightspace or Gradescope.

To solve this, you can create the following shell script and Systemd service to monitor for grade changes. It will email you when any grade file is written to.

Shell script

Place this somewhere like ~/.local/bin/monitor_cs354_grades.sh.

#!/bin/bash

set -e -u -o pipefail

GRADE_DIR=~cs354/grades/"$USER"

inotifywait -m --includei '\.rpt$' -e close_write "$GRADE_DIR" \
    | while read -r dir events file; do
        echo "$file updated" >&2
        printf 'Subject: CS 354 %s grade updated\n\n' "${file%.rpt}" \
            | cat - "${dir}${file}" \
            | sendmail -bm -i "$USER"
        echo "Email sent" >&2
    done

Here is a brief explanation of what this does:

• inotifywait is a tool that uses Linux’s inotify(7) interface to watch for file I/O events.
• We tell inotifywait to monitor for events where a file opened in write mode is closed on files ending with .rpt in the grade directory.
• When it sees such an event, it outputs a single line of text. See the manual page for details on the format.
• We pipe this into a loop that does the following repeatedly:
  • Reads a single line from standard input and stores each field in variable.
  • Prints a subject line followed by the updated file’s contents, and pipes that to sendmail.
  • sendmail is provided by Postfix, the mail server installed on the CS servers, and is used to send email.

Systemd service

Creating the file

To run the shell script in the background constantly, we can use Systemd.

Run the following command to create a new service file. You can replace the name with whatever you like.

$ systemctl --user edit --full monitor-cs354-grades.service

This will open the new file in a text editor. Give it the following contents.

[Unit]
Description=Monitors CS 354 grades and emails upon updates

[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/monitor_cs354_grades.sh
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Running the service

First, enable “linger,” i.e. allow services to run even after you log out. (See loginctl(1) for details.)

$ loginctl enable-linger

Then enable and start the service.

$ systemctl --user enable --now monitor-cs354-grades.service

Some useful systemctl commands:

• Start/stop/enable/disable a unit: systemctl <action> <unit>.
• See a unit’s status: systemctl status <unit>.
• Print a unit’s logs: journalctl --user -eu <unit>.
• Edit a unit: systemctl edit --full <unit>. To apply these commands to your user-scoped Systemd instance instead of the system-level one, insert the --user option as the first argument to the commands.