The command line has a long history, and it can be quite foreign to newcomers. In this chapter, we covered the environment setup steps so that you can follow along with the examples in this book. Essential commands will introduce what you need to succeed, followed by acquiring datasets that we can play with. We will cover all the shell magic, such as background processes, writing shell functions, basic shell control-flow constructs, visualizing results, processing strings, simulating database functionality, simple math constructs, and finally a synthesis of all of these in a penultimate chapter of magical fascination.
Everything you need to explore the rest of the book is now installed and configured. As you saw, the command line can run on pretty much anything, which makes it an invaluable tool to have in your toolkit.
In the next chapter, we will use our newly-installed command-line environment to run some essential commands, learn how to customize the shell, and look at how to use the built-in help when we get stuck.