Introduction

We’ve made our lives a tiny bit easier by automating tasks with our shell, like running commands on files automatically using find, and we’ve got a better handle on how to use the command line. But yeesh, there are so many programs to use on the command line. And every program seems to be different in terms of how you actually use it! How am I supposed to remember all this stuff?!

Some people maybe do, but I don’t. This week we’re going to spend some time getting help from various places:

• The programs themselves (short, but helpful),
• Offline documentation about the programs (comprehensive and correct, but sometimes inscrutable), and
• Online (overwhelming, and sometimes wrong).

This week we’ll also (temporarily?) switch where we do our lab books: we’ll migrate from text editors to the web browser and look at digital notebooks, where we can combine both text and code into one structured place so that we can simultaneously document and explore code.