Having learned the foundations of working with the Unix shell, we are now ready to dive into the first part of the data processing pipeline, namely the fetching and generation of data from diverse data sources.

As parts of this topic we will learn how to obtain data from the internet, retrieve records from a database, send or receive data to or from a remote host, examine history and contributors in configuration management records, locate files meeting specific criteria, examine executable files and libraries, examine and manipulate archives, obtain data from graphical user interfaces, and also how to generate numeric sequences or blocks of data.