Shell Lessons for Archivists

This experimental Library Carpentry lesson (delivered at the UK National Archives in November 2017) introduces archivists to the Unix Shell. At the conclusion of the lesson you will: understand the basics of the Unix shell; understand why and how to use the command line; use shell commands to work with directories and files; use shell commands to find and manipulate data.

Prerequisites

To complete this lesson, you will need a UNIX-like shell environment -see Setup. You will also need to download the file shell-lesson.zip from GitHub to your desktop and extract it there (once you have unzipped/extracted the file, you should end up with a folder called “shell-lesson”).

Schedule

Setup Download files required for the lesson
00:00 1. What is the shell? What is the shell?
What is the command line?
Why should I use it?
01:30 2. Counting and mining with the shell How can I count data?
How can I find data within files?
How can I combine existing commands to do new things?
03:00 3. Working with free text How do we work with complex files?
04:00 Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.