I have written before about the usefulness of command-line scripting in computational science.
Today, while looking for some information on various file test operators in bash (e.g. to check whether a file or directory exists), I found this amazing guide. As the author puts it,

This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses [...]

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For the Mac users among you, here’s something I’ve been doing the last few months that you might find useful.
When you get to the following part of your weekly review (which you are doing, aren’t you?):

Review “Pending” and Support Files
Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.

try using the column [...]

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If you are not familiar with screen (and you use the UNIX command line regularly), you are missing out. I’ve added a new command-line tools section to my tools page. The screen bit, with a link to a good tutorial, is here.

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I recently discovered an interesting piece of open-source software, the CESE single-cell simulator. It’s based on Java and runs on a number of platforms.
The point of this simulator is strictly to run single-cell electrophysiological models. It comes with a few of the staples in the field (like the Luo-Rudy dynamic model), and you can [...]

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There are whole websites dedicated to answering these kinds of questions. However, for the kind of work I do as a computational scientist, I have found some favorites over the last seven years of using Mac OS X. From now on, my current favorites with brief rationale for each one will be posted on [...]

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