Apart from learning programming languages and how to use third party computer programs to deal with all sorts of computing tasks, it is also very helpful to learn about the environment in which these tasks are usually tackled, the shell. For Unix-like operating systems like Linux or MacOS, one of the most widely used shells is Bash. Knowing how to utilize Bash is crucial when working with command line tools or on remote computing servers without a graphical interface.

Git is a widely used version control system for project files. It makes collaborative, distributed work on the same project easy and takes care of tracking changes and synchronizing progress across different locations. Understanding the basic concepts and commands makes it easy to maintain own project files, locally and on multiple computers, and start collaborating with others.

Slurm is a workload manager that takes care of distributing computation resources on a computing cluster to many users. For computing tasks that require more hardware than a normal PC can offer, users with access to such a cluster need to know how to use Slurm in order to get the jobs done.


In this course, you will learn about all three aforementioned topics.

  • navigating and manipulating the filesystem in Bash

  • piping, simple bash scripts, useful command line tools

  • git basics

  • working on remote computing servers and writing Slurm scripts

No prior knowledge or experience with Bash or other shells is needed. There is no need to install additional software on your PC for this course. The course language will be English.