You've made it through your introduction to the command line! By now, you have experienced some of the power of communicating with your computer using text commands. The basic steps you learned today will help as you'll further your digital skills. For example, you might work with the command line interface to set up your version control with git or you'll have your text editor open while writing python scripts or building basic websites with HTML and CSS. Having a grasp of command line basics will not only make you more familiar with how your computer and basic programming work, but it will also give you access to tools and communities that will expand your research.
- Are you wondering how (else) the command line can be deployed for your scholarship? Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff's "Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown" have some answers for you.
- Stephen Ramsay is a scholar that has thought at length about the way the command line is (or can be!) embedded in a researcher's praxis. If you're interested in reading his work, here are two of his finest essays: "Life on the Command Line" and "Programming with Humanists: Reflections on Raising an Army of Hacker-Scholars in the Digital Humanities"
- Data Science at the Command Line is an open access e-book by Jeroen Janssens, a hands-on guide that can help you become a more efficient and productive data scientist through the use of the command line.
- BashGuide offers some good practice techniques for taking your BASH skills to a higher level by teaching you write some simple scripts.
- More command line challenges devised by the GCDI team are available here.
- When working with digital tools, it's usually a good idea to familiarize with their documentation. Here's the Bash Reference Manual, where you can find Bash features for beginners and advanced users.
- Pandoc is an online software that allows users to convert file types through the commandline (from markdown to PDF, for example).
- youtube-dl is a command-line exercise to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter.
- Feeling super brave? You might want to give MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit) a shot! MALLET is a "a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text." It includes tools for document classification, sequence tagging, topic modeling, and numerical optimization.
- What are some of the operations that using the command line, as opposed as your GUI, allows you to perform?
- What has learning to use the command line taught you about your machine?