The course syllabus presents all the important elements of a course before its start. It’s a fundamental document providing a course overview, but also information about deadlines, assessment, certificate, what’s expected from you and what you can expect from us. Read it carefully and use it as a guide for this course.

Broadly, the course is divided into six modules. The first module covers the fundamentals: getting to the command line; introducing the command-line interface; performing input and output redirection; handling files and directories; providing command-line arguments; grouping commands; scripting; execution control; and an overview of the data processing flow covered by the next units. The second module covers how you can obtain data from diverse sources: remote services, archives, remote hosts, the file system, version control systems, compiled code, graphical desktop systems, system administration entities, and even generators. The third module covers selecting data with regular expressions and the grep family of tools and other relevant ones. The fourth module covers processing through sorting and working with sorted data, the mini-languages of the sed and awk tools, obtaining file differences, testing, evaluating expressions, and dealing with characters, lines, graphs, images, and sound. The fifth module covers reporting through summarizing, emailing, and text formatting. Finally the last, sixth module covers good shell practices and advice for improving your shell style.