I’m beginning to enjoy all the little utilities that make up Linux. It’s been about 9 months since I was first exposed to Linux. I had the good fortune to have engineers teach me for a half day session. After that I was able to hit the ground running. Well, not exactly - More like crawling. Using the command line requires getting over the learning curve. And there’s always more to learn.

Most recently I’ve been looking at the codebase for the excellent pandas data analysis library in Python. It contains around 180K lines of Python code:

find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l  
180769 total

The above command looks in the current directory . to find all files whose name matches the regular expression *.py. This output is piped in as the argument to the wc wordcount program which counts the number of lines. I copied this pretty much directly from Stack Overflow.

Another task has been running the built in test suite and examining the output. To do this you need to redirect standard error stderr into a file so you can look at it.

nosetests pandas >> ../notes/Mar9_pandas.log 2>&1

Then navigate to that log file and check it out with the less command.

At night I’ve been reading the book The Pragmatic Programmer. The authors compare building software to being a craftsman. The command line and text editor are like your bench and tools.