Top 12 Essential Command Line Tools for Data Scientists

This post is a short overview of a dozen Unix-like operating system command line tools which can be useful for data science tasks. The list does not include any general file management commands (pwd, ls, mkdir, rm, ...) or remote session management tools (rsh, ssh, ...), but is instead made up of utilities which would be useful from a data science perspective, generally those related to varying degrees of data inspection and processing. They are all included within a typical Unix-like operating system as well. It is admittedly elementary, but I encourage you to seek out additional command examples where appropriate. Tool names link to Wikipedia entries as opposed to man pages, as the former are generally more friendly to newcomers, in my view.