Introduction to the Unix command line

This is very much a hands-on course, with a lot of exercises, mainly from corpus linguistics. This is no coincidence as one of Unix' assets is precisely the processing of files and strings.

Course content:

Day 1 (Monday 12th of September 9.00 AM-1.00 PM)

• Basic Unix commands
• The Unix shell and how to use it interactively
• Exercises: find and count (words)

Day 2 (Tuesday 13th of September 9.00 AM-1.00 PM)

• The Unix philosophy
• More Unix commands
• More about the Unix shell
• Exercises: sorting and transforming

Day 3 (Thursday 15th of September 9.00 AM-1.00 PM)

• Shell scripting
• Exercises: n-grams

Preparation:

The course will be based on Linux, the probably most popular Unix variant today. If you own a Mac you're lucky: macOS is also a Unix variant.

If, however, you own a Windows machine, Unix, i.e. Linux must be emulated. VirtualBox is free and recommended.

There are many Linux distributions, Lubuntu can be recommended, because it's lightweight and also runs on very old PCs.

Contact the course instructor, Bernhard D. Ruef, if you have a problem with the installation, and he`ll try to arrange an installation party before the course starts.

About the course instructor

Bernhard D. Ruef has a Ph.D. in chemistry (more precisely in mass spectrometry, with lots of programming and statistics) but has never worked as a chemist, however in many IT-related jobs (software development, teaching, management, consulting).

From 1991 to 1994 he lived in Norway where he first worked at a transport company and afterwards as an Associate Professor at the Molde University College.

He has also studied Medieval Literature (Norse and Old/Middle English) and (Computational) Linguistics (1998–2005).

Since 2011 he is at the Swiss Law Sources Foundation, a research institution publishing digital editions of law sources.

He has worked with Unix since 1988.