A great many tasks in the daily work of data scientists can more easily be accomplished using interaction at the command line shell than by using “heavier” programming languages like Python or R, let alone by using task-dedicated GUI tools that perform narrow subsets of work needed. The bash shell is a programming language itself but is also a richly interactive tool for constructing “one-off” processing commands. This course familiarizes students both with the interactive command-line capabilities of bash and with writing stand-alone bash scripts of moderate size to encapsulate frequently performed tasks.
2023-02-12