The presumption was that puppet is an important standard in System Engineering and thus important to know or at least to understand quickly (the stage is solvable also without puppet knowledge, the errors are in the brackets/puncutation)

Okay, so maybe it's not puppet, but then it's some other language... whatever uses that => construct to do stuff. I assume it's Ruby or something else that's Shiny these days, and that's not anything I normally use. As a result, that part of it was very much based on poking around and trying different things.

So now it's actually three things. One, it's puppet. Two, it's knowing that puppet uses a particular language's pet syntax to convey things. Three, know that syntax and apply fixes to the example until it can be parsed.

I guess if they're looking for someone who's going to power through it no matter what, then it served its purpose.

BTW, awk vs. grep vs. cut? Come on. You can (ab)use all three tools to get exactly the same output. grep takes a lot of stupid showboating, but it can be done.

Cut doesn't work for finding a specific user. Grep could work, indeed, when using -o. But this is not supported in posix grep - clarified in the quiz that I meant the posix variant.