Berkeley's Okpy is an autograder that grades students' code. A student can use it as many times as he/she wants, but there's a catch: the student must wait for one minute before the next try. This was really annoying to deal with, because sometimes it would just be a typo or a missed parentheses. Thus, we as students naturally wanted to get around it somehow.
My initial workaround to this problem was to use the linux command sleep
which would sleep for a given number of seconds and then run a command. (The full command was sleep 60s && python3 ok
. This worked in that I didn't have to keep running the autograder to see the time remaining, but I still had the 1 minute lock nonetheless. I wanted to find a better way.
My first thought that there could be a better way came when a student had a problem regarding ok (he had nearly infinite remaining time — a weird bugj). An instructor suggested to remove a