Command Line

Everything on this page lives in our longer research computing course, which teaches the shell properly and at a pace you set. Rather than keep a second copy here — one that would drift out of step with it — this page is a map into it.

Nothing here is a prerequisite for this course. Reach for it when a command on one of the lab pages does something you did not expect, or when you want the ground underneath what you have been copying and pasting.

If you want to	Go to
Open a terminal and find your way around — pwd, ls, cd, mkdir, cp, mv, rm, and absolute vs. relative paths	Command Line Basics
Understand how a cluster’s storage is laid out, and which directory to put a thing in	The Cluster File System
Log in to a remote machine over SSH, and understand what that connection is	Connecting to a Cluster
Copy files between your laptop and a cluster with scp	Transferring Files (scp)
Work on many files at once — wildcards, pipes, grep, cut, sort, uniq	Bulk File Operations

The quickest way to stop guessing at a command is to ask Claude Code what it does before you run it — > what does this command do, and what would it change? — and to lean on Tab completion, which will not complete a path that does not exist.