Ask HN: What's your favorite command-line tool for working with data?

8 points

12 years ago

About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about command-line tools for data science [1]. Thanks to HN, I received a lot of valuable comments and pointers to other great command-line tools! In the past 10 months, I have been writing a book titled Data Science at the Command Line [2]. Ever since that blog post, I've been discovering new tools. On the one hand, that's quite frustrating because it's difficult to keep up and include everything in the book. On the other hand, it's fantastic to see that the command line is still very popular!

In order to gain a better overview of what's available, I thought it'd be nice to ask on HN what your favorite tools are to work with data. Many new tools have been developed in the past year, but your favorite one may just be 10 years old. You may think that I'm too late with this question because the book is already finished, but fortunately the book also discusses the underlying concepts which haven't changed too much in the past forty years.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing about your favorite command-line tools. Bonus points if you reply in CSV format "command,url,reason\n", so I can easily scrape the comments :)

Thanks!

PS. For those who are interested, next Wednesday, I'll be doing a webcast about this topic [3], where I might share the outcome of this discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190

[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032823.do

[3] http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3115

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