Well, well, well, look who came to read about what I’ve learned in the command line course
Introduction
In this course, I delved into the intricacies of the command-line environment, learning what Linux is all about and what you can do with it. The course was a thrilling journey where I found myself gaining valuable knowledge and enjoying the content.
Week 1: Introduction to Command Line Environments
- Setting up command line (Ubuntu, in my case);
- Privacy and users in Linux;
- Text editing with Nano;
- Basic Linux commands like ls and less;
This week was a nice and gentle start, without too much technical detail as soon as we started.
Week 2: Navigating a UNIX System
- We learned how to copy, move and remove directories;
- Root directory;
- SSH and scp;
- gzip and tar;
- PIDs of processes;
- Running commands in the background;
This week was filled with many quite different topics, but they were not too complicated on their own and pretty easily digestible.
Week 3: Basic Corpus Processing
- ASCII, Latin-1 and utf-8 encoding systems;
- converting encoding of text files;
- ‘Head’ and ‘tail’ commands;
- Sorting lines in a document;
- Lower casing;
- Removing duplicate lines;
- Searching for patterns;
- Cutting and pasting columns in text files;
This week was a great introduction to working with text.
Week 4: Advanced Corpus Processing
- Deleting lines from documents using ‘sed’ command;
- Finding and replacing patterns using ‘sed’;
- Regex with sed;
- Using pipes with;
- Generating frequency lists;
- Generating sentence per line documents;
- Transforming text files into N-grams;
Regex is magic!
-everyone who gets to understand regex
This was probably my favourite week because I really enjoy working with text. It was very demanding, but equally useful. I was also really motivated because I know how crucial such basic text transformations are in NLP, so I really enjoyed getting to know how to do these things outside of Python.
Week 5: Scripting and Configuration Files
- Writing simple scripts;
- Accessing command line parameters in scripts;
- If statements and while loops;
- Command substitution;
- Looking up variables with ‘echo’;
- Making permanent changes in .bashrc;
- Creating a pleasant command line environment;
I absolutely loved customising my command line with the command line constructor, it was really fun. The scripts were a bit mind boggling at times, but it’s not easy to scare me.
Week 6: Installing and Running Programs
- Giving commands as the root user;
- Using ‘sudo’;
- Installing software using apt-get;
- Creating Python virtual environment;
- Writing and running Makefiles;
In this week I exhaled a little bit as the mind bogglingness was almost absent. I’m no longer scared of the phrase “virtual environment” which is another great achievement.
Week 7: Version Control
- Learning about what version control is and why it is;
- Opening a Github repository;
- Installing Git;
- Cloning repositories;
- Reverting to previous commits;
- Branches;
- Merging with master branch;
In this week I found out that I do not like version control. Maybe I need to have my very own tiny project. The fact that Github just hosts your website is amazing though. Cloning is amazing.
Project
This is how this website came to be.
In this picture you can see me writing this page 20 minutes before my bedtime before I go to Stockholm with my friends tomorrow :)
In this project I brought together all the knowledge that I collected throughout the course. It’s pretty shocking how much I’ve learned in just 2 months. Sometimes I had to spend literally 2-3 days going through all the readings, videos and tasks, but it was well worth it.
I’m honestly amazed that you can learn how to make a simple website and then also implement it in less than one day. And that day also includes teaching 3 English lessons.
| Phase | Description | Honest Feeling | Unexpected Moments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Idea Generation | Chose what to make my website about | Scared and brave at the same time | Realised that making websites is not witchcraft |
| Development | Actually sat down to write code | Discovered newfound respect for web designers | Remembered everything but how to insert a forced line break |
| Reflection | Looking back at the journey of just one day | Mesmerised by computers | Became sleepy |