Metadata
Title
Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering
Category
general
UUID
87caec9468cb49fb978ad177679dfe62
Source URL
https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/unix-tools-data/
Parent URL
https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/our-courses/ai-data-computer-science/programm...
Crawl Time
2026-03-23T11:23:41+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown

Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering

Source: https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/unix-tools-data/ Parent: https://learningforlife.tudelft.nl/our-courses/ai-data-computer-science/programming-software/

Share webpage

Free

For instructor paced courses this is the length of the course.

For self-paced courses this is the length of the course if you spend the amount of time per week as specified. You're free to go faster or slower as you see fit.

6 Weeks - Effort 4 - 6 Hours per week

Enroll on edX

Loading...

Subscribe to back in stock notification

Subscribe

Grow from being a Unix novice to Unix wizard status! Process big data, analyze software code, run DevOps tasks and excel in your everyday job through the amazing power of the Unix shell and command-line tools.

Processing information is the hallmark of all modern organizations, which are increasingly digital: absorbing, processing and generating information is a key element of their business.\ Being able to interact flexibly and efficiently with the underlying data and software systems is an indispensable skill. Knowledge of the Unix shell and its command-line tools boosts the effectiveness and productivity of software developers, IT professionals, and data analysts.

The Unix tools were designed, written, actively used and refined by the team that defined the modern computing landscape. They allow the performance of almost any imaginable computing task quickly and efficiently by judiciously combining key powerful concepts. The power of Unix tools for exploring, prototyping and implementing big data processing workflows, and software engineering tasks remains unmatched. Unix tools, running on hardware ranging from tiny IoT platforms to supercomputers, uniquely allow an interactive, explorative programming style, which is ideal for the efficient solution of many of the engineering and business analytics problems that we face every day.

Through the use of Unix tools:

The course is uniquely based on carefully-selected, interactive walk-through examples that demonstrate how each command operates in practice. The examples that we use involve problems that engineers and analysts face every day. - Details

We start by introducing the key ideas and advantages of Unix tools. We then build many one-liners around the tools that follow a sequence of fetching, selection, processing, summarization and reporting. We demonstrate the tools for each phase: the plumbing that joins the parts into a whole, more specialized commands for handling software development and system administration tasks, sound and images and even graph-structures. We end with a discussion of common use patterns to follow and anti-patterns to avoid.

Week 1 Introduction — Getting to the Command Line; The command-line interface; Input and output redirection; Files and directories; Command-line arguments; Command grouping; Scripting\ Week 2 Execution control; Data processing flow; Data fetching: Remote services, archives, remote hosts, and the file system\ Week 3 Data fetching: Version control systems, compiled code, graphical desktop systems, and system administration; Data generation; Regular expressions and data selection with grep, egrep, and fgrep\ Week 4 Other data selection tools; Processing: Sorting, working with sorted data, sed, awk\ Week 5 Processing: File differences, testing, and expressions dealing with characters, lines, and graphs\ Week 6 Processing images and sound; Summarizing; Reporting: Email and text formatting; Good shell practices; Improving your shell style

Throughout the course you'll be monitoring your progress through more than 110 knowledge checks. Furthermore, five progress assessments interspersed throughout the course will allow you to demonstrate in practice how you deploy your newly acquired skills by completing about 20 carefully selected tasks modeled after real-life scenarios. Many of the questions will set you off on a virtual treasure hunt, providing you with the opportunity to experiment with what you've learned in order to derive the right answer. - Qualifications

##### Chartered Engineering Competences

All our online courses and programs have been matched to the competences determined by KIVI’s Competence Structure, a common frame of reference for everyone, across all disciplines, levels and roles.

These competences apply to this course:

This is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that runs on edX.

##### Prerequisites

This course is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Our MOOCs are delivered on edX.org and are open to all. They include video lectures, readings, assignments, and community discussions. Content is free, with optional certificates and additional exercises available for a fee.

Press to skip carousel

Press to go to carousel navigation

AI skills: Introduction to Unsupervised, Deep and Reinforcement Learning

4 - 6 Hours per week

Free