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