Join former Nashville Software School instructors Charlie Penner and Andy Collins as they dive into the fundamentals of constructing Bash commands in this example-driven and witty talk. Using nothing but the power of the Bash command line, they slice and dice, pick and poke, and generally play around with a few data files from Nashville’s Open Data Portal. You’ll learn you don’t need a lot of fancy tools to get the job done when you’re willing to put in a little work and embrace the Unix philosophy of combining simple, single-purpose command line programs.

0:00 Introductions

4:05 Nashville Open Data Portal

5:33 What is the Bash shell?

7:04 The difference between the shell and the terminal

8:29 What’s so great about Bash?

9:58 What’s the difference between Bash and Z shell?

What can we do with Bash?

11:42 Navigating the Terminal

13:50 Getting open data through the terminal

18:52 Saving your data into a file

19:32 What can you do with this thing called curl? | Looking it up in the manual

20:37 Navigating within your terminal

21:51 Save the data to a local file using curl

25:41 What language(s) can you use to to understand this JSON data file

27:35 Combining Commands

29:22 Troubleshooting errors

33:13 Installing jq

36:10 Looking at 1 record at a time

38:10 Searching for a record by street name

46:05 Downloading several files at the same time using curl

54:00 Wrap Up and Questions

For more on the shell, check out our blog post Shellabration: Customizing Your Shell Environment