Introduction to the Unix Shell
- Pre-workshop activities:
- Hands-on activities:
What is the Unix Shell?
The Unix Shell is a way to interact with your computer by providing it with textual instructions. This can seem daunting to new users, but it is a very powerful tool that, with some foundational understanding, can be used for a number of different computational and data management tasks.
Why use the shell?
- Very valuable as background knowledge for learning coding languages for the first time
- Easily automate file/folder movements that are often repeated
- Easily integrates with other tools and platforms in data workflows and pipelines
- Connect to remote machines and high-performance computing clusters
Learning Objectives:
Audience:
This session is intended to be a slow and encouraging introduction to the Unix Shell, aimed at those that have little to no experience with this tool.
By the end of this workshop, you will:
- Become familiar with the command line interface and file paths
- Execute Unix commands to navigate through the files and folders in your computer
- Create a directory hierarchy, and use an editor to create files in that hierarchy
- Edit, move, and remove files and directories using Unix commands