At long last, a new command line tutorial. This installment deals with a somewhat thorny concept called redirection. But everything will be just fine, so long as you just picture it as one big funnel.

An awesome quote about automation courtesy of NodeBox.

Repetition is what computers are really good at; they never grow bored, you can ask them to do the same thing over and over again and they will never stop liking it. And they're fast at calculating too ... once you get the first time right, just let the computer handle the hundred other times.

Word.

Mayhap soon I'll write up some tutorials on using NodeBox to make lots of shiny new things.

So, if anybody would like to send me a shiny spiffy banner for the page here, that would be fantastic. Bonus points for banners that were created programmatically, like with NodeBox or Processing. If there are a bunch, maybe I could even rotate them, automagically.

Ready to learn more about the command line? I'm ready to teach you more.

All the cool kids are doing it, looping. Go join them.

I've finished migrating the tutorials from their previous home to here, and I've written up directions for Part 06 of the Life on the Command Line series.

This installment will take you through constructing a loop -- the thing that makes automation go. So, go!

So, I've been working on properly formatting the command line tutorials so they are easy to read and follow. I'm already liking this setup for the tutorials, rather than the blog format. All tutorials are now part of their own series, and they each have a handy "printer view" so that you can easily print out a tutorial to have handy as you're going through it, if it helps to read on paper rather than on screen. (I'm not mocking; I used to code on paper. Seriously.)

A series of tutorials that provide an introduction to the command line.

Users are guided through the process of automating the download of twenty PDF files from the Library of Congress webpage, and extracting LC Subject Heading information from each.

From the introduction...

...You need to know this. You really do. If you're a librarian, and you're working with lots of information -- and I mean, lots, like information overload lots -- you need to be equipped with a way to handle this information without resorting to mind-numbing data entry methods.

As I began writing a series of tutorials on my (temporarily out of service) blog, it became clear to me that the best organization and delivery system for these tutorials wasn't, in fact, the blog. So I've redesigned, created an admittedly cheesy acronym, and started uploading the tutorials for the command line series. I'm hoping to do a number of tutorials, all focused on providing librarians with practical introductions to technologies, with an emphasis on what will be useful to them in their everyday work.