Command-Line Data Inspection with Bash, Sed, and Wc

Raw data files often arrive unstructured, oversized, or poorly formatted, making quick data inspection a challenge. This text-based course teaches you how to leverage the speed and power of the command line to analyze file structures and generate quick statistics directly from your terminal. You will transition from manual file inspection to running efficient, automated terminal pipelines. In this course, you will learn to: - Understand foundational data structures and standard text file encodings - Count lines, words, and characters using the wc command - Inspect specific portions of large datasets using head and tail - Isolate and filter columns using cut and basic awk commands - Clean and modify text streams efficiently with sed - Chain commands together using pipes to build reusable data audit workflows Starting with basic terminal navigation and data concepts, you will progress through structured text-based readings and terminal practice scenarios. You will explore modern CLI practices, such as handling large CSVs safely without loading them into memory and managing command-line redirects. This course is designed for beginners, data analysts, and aspiring developers who want to inspect data files quickly without heavy GUI tools. No prior programming or terminal experience is required to begin.