6. An introduction to the shell

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IMPORTANT NOTICE!!

Maybe the most imporant thing to keep in mind while going through these pages is that this is all about exposure, not memorization or mastering anything. Don't worry about the details 🙂

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6.1. Some terminology

First, here are some terms that are often used interchangeably when referring to the text-based environment we were working in yesterday. It’s not important to remember the differences, but they’re here just so we see them at least once 🙂

	Term	What it is
	shell	what we use to talk to the computer; anything where you are pointing and clicking with a mouse is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) shell; something with text only is a Command Line Interface (CLI) shell
	command line	a text-based environment capable of taking input and providing output (a "terminal" is the same idea)
	Unix	a family of operating systems
	bash	the most common programming language used at a Unix command-line

6.2. Why learn the command line?

(modified from the carpentries)

• Many bioinformatics tools can only be used through a command-line interface, and/or have extra capabilities in the command-line version that are not available in the GUI (e.g. BLAST).

• It makes our work less error-prone. When humans do the same thing a hundred different times (or even ten times), we’re likely to make a mistake. Your computer can do the same thing a thousand times with no mistakes. This also frees us up to do other things we can’t automate, like the science part.

• The shell makes our work more reproducible. When we carry out our work in a command-line interface (rather than a GUI), we can keep an exact record of all steps, which we can use to re-do our work when we need to. It also gives us a way to unambiguously communicate what we’ve done to others.

• Many bioinformatic tasks require large amounts of computing power and can’t realistically be run on our own machines. These tasks are best performed using remote computers or cloud computing, which can only be accessed through a shell.

6.3. So let’s get to it!

1. Getting started

2. Working with files and directories

3. Redirectors and wildcards

4. Six glorious commands

5. Variables and For loops

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