d2lmf

A command-line tool to help mark assignments submitted to D2L

Motivation

It's frustrating dealing with the zip files full of assignment submissions that you get from D2L.

• Merging all of a student's submissions into a single folder is tedious.
• Navigating submissions on the command line sucks, because each directory name starts with a long number.
• Extracting all the zip files, tar archives, and 7z archives that students submit adds a needless extra step to marking.

I've found this tool useful for eliminating those annoyances, and I hope you will too.

How to Use

This is the most common command I use:

d2lmf extract -R "Assignment 1 Download Oct 11, 2015 803 PM.zip" A1/T01

It extracts the submissions from the zip folder into the directory A1/T01. The -R option makes it run all the recommended cleanup actions on the submissions, and is equivalent to using -x, -j, -c and -m.

The -x specifies that we want to extract any zip, rar, tar, or 7z archives that students submitted. The -j deletes 'junk' like .DS_Store. The -c collapses needlessly nested directories. Finally, the -m merges all submitted files into a single directory for each student.

If you haven't added your local Python bin directory to your path, you may need to invoke d2lmf as a module, like so:

python -m d2lmf extract -R "Assignment 1 Download Oct 11, 2015 803 PM.zip" A1/T01

How to Install

d2lmf is available through pip. If you're running a recent version of Python, you probably already have pip installed. If not, that's the first step in each of the commands below.

After installing, you may want to follow the instructions to add your local Python bin directory to your PATH.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python-pip
pip install --user d2lmf

OSX

sudo easy_install pip
pip install --user d2lmf

Windows

First, download and install Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/

Then, install d2lmf:

python -m pip install --user d2lmf

Dependencies

The extraction of rar and 7z archives depends on external tools. If you do not have a rar or 7z utility installed, those archives will be skipped.

On Windows, I suggest installing 7-Zip. On Ubuntu, p7zip is the equivalent, and it can be installed with sudo apt-get install p7zip-full. p7zip is also available for OSX, and can be installed from homebrew with brew install p7zip.