Introduction to the Command Line
Course further information
Learn to run command-line programs and manage files by typing.
The command line is an interactive interface to your computer. Instead of controlling it by clicking you type in commands. At first glance, this might seem old-fashioned and uncomfortable. But if you are working with many files at the same time or are programming, using the command line is a very efficient tool.
Searching through files in a directory and its subdirectories for a word or another sequence of characters as well as finding all files that have been modified in a certain period are examples of the command line’s strength. In addition, many scripts and applications written by other researchers can only be used from the command line.
In this workshop we will teach the most common commands of Bash, a command-line interface (or shell) for the operating system. Bash was first created for Unix, but is now available for all major Desktop operating systems: macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.
The course language is English.
Requirements
During the course you will type along, following the instructors, preferably on your own machine. For this you need a working installation of Bash. Bash should already be installed on all machines with Linux and macOS as the operating system. To get Bash on Windows, you can install Git (https://git-scm.com/downloads), which contains GitBash. If you already installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about), you also already have Bash installed. Alternatively, you can use computers provided at the workshop location, where all needed software is already installed. But we recommend that you use your own machine and with your usual environment.
No special previous knowledge is required for the course. You should only be familiar with the basic concepts file system, file, and directory (or folder).
Certificate
This course is part of our Software Carpentry workshop. In order to receive the Software Carpentry Certificate you also have to attend the other two courses:
