Introduction

We’re here to teach you about computers and computers really do four things:

They can do the last of these in many different ways. The most common way of doing this is using a graphical interface. Another way to do this is using a command line text interface called the shell.

The shell is very useful for three main reasons:

  1. Automating data analysis
  2. Combining existing tools in powerful ways with only a few keystrokes
  3. Interacting with remote machines

###Why you should care

Shortcuts

Wednesday

Shebangs

A shebang is a special code at the beginning of a script to tell the shell to run it as a scripot for a particular language.

Comes from Sharp(#) + Bang(!)

Syntax

Portability

Above commands work on Linux and Mac. To allow use on Windows:

This looks for the interpreter in the PATH