Organizers: Lucy Skrabanek, Jason Banfelder (ICB, WMC)

Goals and Objectives: This workshop is divided into four three-hour sessions. At the end of the workshop, attendees are expected to be comfortable using the UNIX operating system.

Schedule:

Part 1 (day 1: 3 hours)
This part covers logging in and out of a UNIX system, as well as the basics of file system structure and the use of some basic commands to view and manipulate files and their contents. Basic operation and use of the vi text editor is also covered. Pattern matching using regular expression is introduced.

Part 2 (day 2: 3 hours)
This part covers how the system runs programs, more advanced file manipulation and documentation. Specifically, advanced vi operation, more complex regular expressions and utility commands such as tar and gzip are covered. These commands and constructs are useful for the efficient analysis and manipulation of files. The use and interpretation of UNIX documentation is taught so that full functionality of available commands may be understood.

Part 3 (day 3: 3 hours)
This part focuses on data wrangling. We introduce relevant UNIX commands such as sort and uniq. We will also introduce operation of the sqlite3 database, showing how to create and query tables. We will briefly discuss the basics of database design.

Part 4 (day 4: 3 hours)
This part covers shell scripting that is used to automate complex, multi-step tasks. Specifically, simple programming structures, such as if-then logic and loops, and automatic scheduling of scripts are reviewed.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with a personal desktop computer operating system, such as Macintosh or Windows, is desirable.