Learning about data handling on the command line

Links to open materials

• Five Command Line Tools for Data Science
• Data science at the command line
  • The 2nd edition is being developed, which seems to include promising updates once it is finished
• An AWK primer
• Introduction to grep and regular expressions

Tools

• grep: Pattern matching (in files)
• xsv: Working with (large) csv files on the command line
• sed: Also string finding

Useful commands

• Count the number of *Rmd files in directory

$ ls | grep Rmd | wc -l

• Remove all files of type *html in directory

$ find . -name "*.html" -type f | xargs rm -f

• Search through all files in a directory

$ grep -r "search-string"
$ grep "search-string" *

• Find a file based on pattern in file name:

$ find . -name "*pattern*"

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Last updated: 2022-02-16

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