Getting Started with Unix
Unix as an operating system
Many applications in bioinformatics and statistical genetics incorporate the use of Unix. The use of Unix as an operating system is important for a few reasons such as
Ease of building efficient pipelines for your work i.e. awk, bash, piping
Ease of software installation and development
Multiple versions of a tool can be installed by the user, just in case an analysis requires an older version of the tool
Many good scientific tools (i.e. aligners, samtools) which allow for flexibility in analysis is written in a non-portable way for Unix
Text editing/viewing tools (i.e. sort, cut, paste) are memory efficient
Large file sizes are handled in a relatively more efficient way compared to Mac OS or Windows.
Recommended courses to learn about Unix
Therefore, the base of the Sandbox is a Unix operating system. The terminal application in the Sandbox is the most basic operator for the Sandbox. There are many courses out there that can allow efficient learning of Unix as a programming tool and operating system. One that we recommend is by Coursera:
Primer and application to Unix: https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix
Click here to read more about Unix tools that you can use in Sandbox
Click here to see examples on how to unzip files in the command line
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