Usually, we use our own command line and the command SSH to access the command line of a different computer. Our personal computers simply are not powerful enough, do not have enough disk space, and do not have fast enough internet connections to act as a reasonable computing resource for us. Most of the time, scientists don’t run programs and store data on their own computers. Now, you’re set up and ready to do some scientific computing! Accesing Far Away Places via SSH Once you have the Ubuntu subsystem set up, you can access a bash shell by opening the Command Prompt, as before, and simply typing bash to open the bash shell. Follow this guide in order to get it set up on your computer.
If you use Windows 10, then you actually already have an Ubuntu installation on your computer. If you don’t have Windows 10, this is the end of the road for you, and you’ll have to use PuTTY in order to access another machine which has a bash shell you can use, which we’ll talk about later. Since the shell provided by Windows is not Bash, it is largely irrelevant. On Windows 7, there should be a search function with the same capability, just type “cmd” into there to find the program. If you are on Windows 10, just start typing “cmd” and it should pop up. Simply open the application Command Prompt. Instead it uses a different shell, which you can access all the same. Unfortunately, Windows is not based on the Unix operating system and thus it does not have a Bash shell. This will open a Bash shell that lets you interact with your computer textually instead of visually. You already have a Bash command line on your computer! Simply open the application Terminal and you’re ready to go. Windows is completely different, and a lot of the time that makes it unfit for scientific work if you need to use the command line a lot. Mac operating system OS X is actually based on Unix and there are also many flavors of Linux based on Unix as well (Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.). Unix is just a type of operating system, which many other operating systems are based on. It basically wraps the operating system with a human interface (hence the name shell). Bash is what is known as a shell, which acts as a command interface between you and a computer which is running a Unix based operating system. What is usually meant when people say “I use the command line” or “I use the terminal” is “I use Bash to work on my Unix machine”. The way they do this is by interacting with the computer via the command line, basically telling the computer through text what to do instead of through pointing and clicking, as most of us are used to. They need to run programs, create programs on remote computers, and move files around all without a mouse and a screen. Most scientists are required to interact with computers without a Graphical User Interface (GUI) i.e. You may have heard about using the command line before to interact with a computer.
Make sure that you have each of the following software packages sucessfully installed before continuing.
Accompanying lecture: Introduction to the Command Line Software to Install