General advice on sundry topics such as working in the shell.
When first learning the bash command line, it's helpful to organize projects in a single place.
Open a shell and type the following to create a code/ directory on your Desktop.
mkdir ~/Desktop/code
Whenever you open a shell, remember that you'll start out in the Home directory (typically something like /Users/yourname on a Mac).
Before starting a new project, it's a good idea to navigate over to your code directory.
cd ~/Desktop/code
Better yet, create a new folder in the code directory and work inside of that.
cd ~/Desktop/code
mkdir new-project
cd new-project
If you're ever confused about which directory you're in on the command line, type pwd to print the "working" directory.
If you're working on a shell script that requires multiple commands (e.g. creating a script that downloads and processes data), a common workflow is to start by experimenting with the commands directly in the shell.
Once you're confident that a command is working as expected, copy and paste the command over to the script. Then run the script to verify all the steps work together.
You can repeat this process to incrementally build out a script.
Check out the YouTube video Tinker, copy, run. Repeat and the related slide deck for an overview using a Bash shell script example.
And don't forget: You should be using a proper code editor such as Visual Studio Code to create and edit shell scripts.
You can easily review a history of commands you've typed on a shell by invoking the history command.
history
If you're trying to pinpoint certain commands, you can also filter the list returned by history:
# Example searching for commands that operated on CSVs
history | grep csv
Python ships with an interactive interpreter that you can fire up from any shell terminal by simply typing python. This interactive environment allows you to test out Python code in a live environment. It's incredibly useful for experimenting with code prior to moving into a longer script (similar to the workflow described above for tinkering on the shell).
For this course, however, we recommend installing ipython, a more user-friendly and feature-rich version of the Python interactive interpreter.
pip install ipython
Now fire it up.
ipython
Once you're done working, exit the Python interpreter and return to the regular bash shell:
# Either type `CTRL + d` or
exit()