The Unix Shell

Daniel Wheeler

Helpers: Clara Turp, John Orazem, Kim Pham, Sarah Lin, Benson Muite

Why learn the shell?

• past, present and future

• develops fundamental mental model about your computer

• when all else fails

• cloud / AWS / supercomputing / remote computing / broken computer

• automate file system and OS tasks

• foundation for other programming languages

Lesson Plan

• Navigation

• Files and Directories

• Repeating things

• Data pre-processing / mining

• Shell scripts

What is the Shell / Bash / Command Line?

• Interface to your computer like a GUI (GUI/CLI)

• REPL - read / evaluate / print / loop

• command shell - shells off the OS and filesystem from the command line making it simpler to interactive with

• BASH is one type of shell, there are others

• it is a programming language, but in an interactive way

• experience with interactive programming?

Operations

• live coding - follow along - lots of typing

• just need bash right now

  • $

  • $ pwd

• get the data

  • https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-shell/data/shell-lesson.zip

• feel free to unmute and ask me to slow down or ask questions

  • also in the chat or etherpad