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Lecture notes. Written from the material of Berkeley Stat 243, licensed CC BY 4.0. These are notes, not a transcript: the material has been reorganised and rewritten. This adaptation carries the same licence, and the original is linked above.

2. Bash Shell Tutorial and Exercises

What this covers

This is not a lecture but the course's first assignment: it sends the student off to teach themselves the Unix/Linux command-line shell from an external tutorial, ahead of in-class demonstrations built on top of that groundwork. It assumes only that the reader has access to a terminal; the shell itself is not explained here, since the assignment's own content is a reading and exercise list, not an exposition of bash.

What the assignment asks

The assignment points to a tutorial on using the bash shell, hosted separately at computing.stat.berkeley.edu/tutorial-using-bash, and specifies exactly how much of it to work through: the first four pages, "Overview" through "Shell Programming." Two of the tutorial's pages — "Regular Expressions" and "Managing Processes" — are explicitly excluded from this assignment; by implication they are covered later or separately, once more of the shell has been introduced.

Alongside the reading, the assignment sets the first ten problems from the tutorial's own exercises page as the work to submit. The submission is deliberately informal: answers go in via Pensive, with no requirement to format them, explain them, or comment on them, and no requirement to place them in the course's GitHub repository. The instructor notes it is even acceptable to hand-write the answers and scan them — the point of the assignment is that the tutorial gets worked through, not that the answers are presented any particular way.

The assignment is timed deliberately: in-class demonstrations of the bash shell begin on August 28, and this self-study is meant to run alongside and support them rather than substitute for them.

Where the material actually lives

The tutorial's content — what a shell is, how the filesystem and commands it introduces work, what "Shell Programming" covers — is not reproduced in the assignment text and so is not reproduced here. Nor are the ten exercises themselves; they live on the tutorial's exercises page, external to the material supplied for this chapter. What this chapter records is the instructions for using that material, not the material itself.

Sources

  • docs/statistical-computing/berkeley/stat243/fall-2026/units/assignment1.md (converted from units/assignment1.qmd in the berkeley-stat243 fall-2026 course repository, CC BY 4.0) — the full text of the assignment: which tutorial pages to read, which to skip, which exercises to do, submission logistics, and the August 28 date for the in-class demonstrations.
  • Referred to but not contained in the supplied material: the tutorial itself, at computing.stat.berkeley.edu/tutorial-using-bash, and its exercises page at computing.stat.berkeley.edu/tutorial-using-bash/exercises.

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