Introduction

Purpose: Introduce participants to the unix command line to increase efficiency and reproducibility.

Background: Scientific research, and especially scientific synthesis, requires extensive computing, which typically involves creation of hudreds or thousands of data files, analytical processes, and many products such as graphs, model outputs, maps, images, and more. Managing this complexity is often really hard, and researchers can easily lose track of just what they did, when, and why. Thus, traditional approaches to managing the research process often fail the reproducibility test, as even the original investigators can’t repeat their initial process.

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Thus, the command line. The command-line provides two major advantages to the researcher:

These advantages come at the cost of:

Learning outcomes

  1. To understand the advantages of the command line over graphical interfaces
  2. To understand the basic philosophy of Unix
  3. To learn core Unix commands for navigation and file management

The Command Line