Accessing the Shared Class Folder

Owned by Giang Rudderham
Last updated: Jan 04, 2024 by Cody Johnson
4 min read

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Locating the "classdata" Folder

  • If the course instructor requested a shared storage space for your class, after logging in to IDAS, you will see a folder called "classdata".
  • For example, if your course uses Jupyter Lab, you will see the "classdata" folder on your Lab page:


  • If your course uses Jupyter Notebook, you will see the "classdata" folder in the Jupyter Hub tree page:

  • If your course uses RStudio, you will see the “classdata” folder on the right side, under “Files” in RStudio.

  • You can click on the "classdata" folder to open it and view the files in it. You can also copy those files to your personal IDAS home drive.


If you are accessing the "classdata" folder from the Terminal, the path to the folder is "/home/your_hawkid/classdata" or "$HOME/classdata" where $HOME stands for "/home/your_hawkid".


Copying Files from the "classdata" Folder to Your IDAS Home Drive

There are 2 ways to copy files from the "classdata" folder to your IDAS home drive.


Method 1: Using the Terminal

  1. Log in to the IDAS instance for your course.
  2. Start a Terminal session.
    • If your course uses Jupyter Lab, click the "Terminal" tile under "Other" in your Jupyter Lab page:

    • If your course uses Jupyter Notebook, click "New" in the upper right section of the Jupyter Hub tree page, then choose "Terminal:
    •  
    • If your course uses RStudio, click on the "Terminal" tab, which is next to the "Console" tab in RStudio:

  2. To copy everything in the "classdata" folder to your IDAS home drive, type the following command in Terminal:

    cp -ur $HOME/classdata/* $HOME
    1. The "cp" command copies files and directories.
    2.  The "-u" option indicates copying only new and missing files to the destination, and the "-r" option indicates drilling down through the directory structure. For more information on "cp", please type in Terminal: "cp --help".
    3. $HOME is the path to your IDAS home directory, which is "/home/your_hawkid" on IDAS.

  3. If you want to copy everything in the "classdata" folder to a folder called "assignment1" in your IDAS home drive, type the following command in Terminal:

    cp -ur $HOME/classdata/* $HOME/assignment1

  4. If you want to copy a specific file called "file1.txt" in "classdata" to the folder "assignment1" in your IDAS home drive:

    cp $HOME/classdata/file1.txt $HOME/assignment1
  5. And to copy multiple, specific files in "classdata" to the folder "assignment1":
    cp $HOME/classdata/file1.txt $HOME/classdata/file2.csv $HOME/classdata/file3.ipynb $HOME/assignment1

Method 2: Manual selection

The method below works from the Jupyter Notebook interface.

Use this method only if the students have been given Read Only access to the shared class folder. If the students have been given Read/Write access to the shared folder, they could end up removing files from the shared folder, making those files unavailable for other students in the class.

Students' access to the shared class folder are set up based on the instructor's request for their class instance. Please contact research-computing@uiowa.edu if you have any questions or need assistance.


  1. After logging in to the IDAS instance for your course, locate the "classdata" folder using the instructions above. Click on the folder to open it.
  2. Check the boxes in front of the files that you want to copy, and click "Move":

    1. Click "Move" and not "Duplicate". "Duplicate" will make a copy of the files to the current folder, which will fail.

  3. A dialogue will pop up, asking for the destination of the copies. Enter the name of the folder where you want the copies. For example, if you want the copies to be in the folder "assignment1" in your IDAS home drive:

  4. Or if you just want the files in your IDAS home drive and not in any folder, leave the text entry blank:

  5. Click "Move".

  6. A warning message will pop up for each of the files that you chose. Don't worry about this. Just click OK so that the warning message goes away.
  7. Open the destination folder and check to make sure that the files have been copied successfully. 

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Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please contact research-computing@uiowa.edu.