Introduction

We’ve been using the command line, at least a little bit, throughout the course. Despite its simple appearance, the command line is an incredibly rich and diverse environment, and lets you compose really complex commands that would be difficult to do with the visual desktop tools that you have at your disposal right now.

We’ll spend some time looking at how to use our shells effectively, and we’ll look at how to build up pipelines of programs to accomplish complex tasks. We’ll also be spending some time documenting how we accomplished those complex tasks with shell scripting.