BIOTECH-7005-BIOINF-3000

Week 3 Practicals

Introduction to Bash

Introduction

Over the first two weeks we introduced the language R, which is heavily used in bioinformatics. R is particularly effective for interacting with and visualising data, as well as performing statistical analyses. However, in modern bioinformatics R is commonly used in the middle to late stage of many analyses. An important step in many analyses is moving data around on a high-performance computer (HPC), and setting jobs running that can take hours, days or even weeks to perform. For this, we need to learn how to write scripts which perform these actions, and the primary language for this is bash.

We can utilise bashin two primary ways:

  1. Interactively through the terminal
  2. Through a script which manages various stages of an analysis

For much of today we will work interactively, however a complete analysis should be scripted so we have a record of everything we do. This is often referred to as Reproducible Research, and in reality, our scripts are like an electronic lab book and can be used to protect our discoveries when we all patent our cures for cancer. Likewise, when you’re writing your thesis, referring back to your scripts will be very useful for writing your methods section.

Running bash on your VM

All computers running MacOS and Linux have a terminal built-in as part of the standard setup, whilst for Windows there are several options, including git bash which also enables use of version control for your scripts. To keep everything consistent for this practical, we’ll use the terminal which is available inside RStudio. Note that even though we’re using RStudio, we won’t be interacting with R today as R runs interactively in the Console. Instead we’ll be using one of the other features provided by RStudio to access bash

To access this, open RStudio as you have for the previous practicals

Setup the directory for today

Just as we’ve created a new R Project for practicals 1 and 2, let’s create a new one for today to make sure we’re all in the same place.

This again helps us keep our code organised and is good practice.

In Rstudio make sure the Console window is visible, inside this pane, you will see a Terminal Tab so click on this and you will be at an interactive terminal running bash. Historically, bash is a replacement for the earlier Bourne Shell, written by Stephen Bourne, so the name is actually a hilarious joke. We’ll explore a few important commands below, and the words shell and bash will often be used interchangeably with the terminal window. Our apologies to any purists.

If you’ve ever heard of the phrase shell scripts, this refers to a series of commands like we will learn in these sessions, strung together into a plain text file, and which is then able to be run as a single process.

Although we haven’t specifically mentioned this up until now, your virtual machines are actually running the Ubuntu flavour of Linux, and we can access these machines by logging in remotely, as well as through the RStudio interface. (We will not cover the use of ssh clients in this course, and our current VMs have direct ssh logins for students disabled. If you are interested in this, talk to one of the instructors.) Most High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems you use will require a knowledge of Linux so these practicals will give you the basics skills for working in this environment. Most of the data analysis performed by Bioinformaticians at UoA relies on the University of Adelaide HPC for data storage and data processing.

Initial Goals

Now we have setup our VM, the basic aims of the following sessions are:

  1. Gain familiarity and confidence within the Linux command-line environment
  2. Learn how to navigate directories (folders), as well as to copy, move and delete the files within them
  3. Look up the name of a command needed to perform a specified task

Finding your way around

Once you’re in the Terminal section of RStudio, you will notice some text in the prompt, describing your computer of the form

(base) a1234567@ip-10-255-0-126:/shared/a1234567/Practical_3$

The word (base) before the prompt text means that Anaconda is active and is using the base environment. Don’t worry about this for now.

The first section of the prompt text describes your username (a1234567) and the machine @ip-10-255-0-126. The end of the machine identifier is marked with a colon (:).

After the colon, the string (~/Practical_3) represents your current directory, whilst the dollar sign ($) indicates the end of this path and the beginning of where you will type commands. This is the standard interface for the Bourne-again Shell, or bash.

Where are we?

pwd

Type the command pwd in the terminal then press the Enter key and you will see the output which describes the current directory you are in.

pwd

The command pwd is what we use to print the current (i.e. working) directory. If you have setup the R project like we instructed above this command should return the RStudio project directory.

/shared/a1234567/Practical_3

Check with your neighbour to see if you get the same thing. If not, see if you can figure out why.

At the beginning of this section we mentioned that ~/Practical_3 represented your current directory, but now our machine is telling us that our directory is /shared/a1234567/Practical_3. This raises an important and very useful point. In bash the ~ symbol is a shortcut for the home directory of the current user. If Anna was logged in, this would be /shared/Anna whilst if Dave was logged in this would be /shared/Dave. As we are all logged on as aXXXXXXX, this now stands for /shared/a1234567. (Formally, ~ is a variable, but we’ll deal with variables later.)

Importantly every user with an account on one of our virtual machines will have their own home directory of the format /shared/a1234567, /shared/a1234568 etc.. Notice that they will all live in the directory /shared which is actually the parent directory that all users on our system will have a home directory in, as we’ve just tried to explain. This can be confusing for many people, so hopefully we’ll clear this up in the next section or two.

In the above, the /shared directory itself began with a slash, i.e. /. On a unix-based system (i.e. MacOS and Linux), the / directory is defined to be the root directory of the file system. Windows users would be more familiar with seeing C:\ as the root of the computer, and this is an important difference in the two directory structures. Note also that whilst Windows uses the backslash (\) to indicate a directory, a Linux-based system uses the forward slash (/), or more commonly referred to simply as “slash”, marking another but very important difference between the two.

cd

Now we know all about where we are, the next thing we need to do is go somewhere else. The bash command for this is cd which we use to change directory. No matter where we are in a file system, we can move up a directory in the hierarchy by using the command

cd ..

The string .. is the convention for one directory above, whilst a single dot represents the current directory.

Enter the above command and notice that the location immediately to the left of the $ has now changed. Enter pwd again to check this makes sense to you.

If we now enter

cd ..

a couple more times we should be in the root directory of the file system and we will see /$ at the end of our prompt. Try this and print the working directory again (pwd). The output should be the root directory given as /.

This what the directory structure of the root level directory looks like.

.
├── Anaconda3-2022.10-Linux-x86_64.sh
├── apps
├── bin -> usr/bin
├── boot
├── dev
├── environment -> .singularity.d/env/90-environment.sh
├── etc
├── home
├── init
├── lib -> usr/lib
├── lib32 -> usr/lib32
├── lib64 -> usr/lib64
├── libexec
├── libssl1.1_1.1.0g-2ubuntu4_amd64.deb
├── libx32 -> usr/libx32
├── media
├── mnt
├── opt
├── proc
├── rocker_scripts
├── root
├── run
├── sbin -> usr/sbin
├── shared
├── singularity -> .singularity.d/runscript
├── srv
├── sys
├── tmp
├── usr
└── var

We can change back to our home folder by entering one of either:

cd ~

or

cd

The initial approach taken above to move through the directories used what we refer to as a relative path, where each move was made relative to the current directory. Going up one directory will clearly depend on where we are when we execute the command.

An alternative is to use an absolute path. An absolute path on Linux/Mac will always begin with the root directory symbol /.

For example, /foo would refer to a directory called foo in the root directory of the file system (NB: This directory doesn’t really exist, it’s an example). In contrast, a relative path can begin with either the current directory (indicated by ./) or a higher-level directory (indicated by ../ as mentioned above). A subdirectory foo of the current directory could thus be specified as ./foo, whilst a subdirectory of the next higher directory would be specified by ../foo. If the path does not have a ./ or ../ prefix, the current directory is used, so foo is the same as ./foo.

Another common absolute path is the one mentioned right at the start of the session, specified with ~, which stands for your home directory /shared/a1234567, which also starts with a /.

We can also move through multiple directories in one command by separating them with the slash /. For example, we could also get to the root directory from our home directory by typing

cd ../../

Return to your home directory using cd.

In the above steps, this has been exactly the same as clicking through directories in our familiar folder interface that we’re all familiar with. Now we know how to navigate folders using bash instead of the GUI point and click file manager. This is an essential skill when logged into a High Performance Computer (HPC) or a Virtual Machine (VM) as the vast majority of these run using Linux without a graphical user interface.

Important

Although we haven’t directly discovered it yet, most file systems used on Unix-based systems such as Ubuntu are case-sensitive, whilst Windows file systems are usually not. For example, the command PWD is completely different to pwd and doesn’t actually exist on your (or any) default installation of bash.

If PWD happened to be the name of a command which has been defined in your shell, you would get completely different results than from the intended pwd command. Most bash tools are named using all lower-case, but there are a handful of exceptions.

We can also change into a specific directory by giving the path to the cd command using text instead of dots and symbols. Making sure you’re in your home directory we can change back into the Practical_3 directory

cd
cd Practical_3
pwd

This is where we started the session.

Tab auto-completion

In a similar way that RStudio offered ‘suggestions’ when we start typing the name of a function, bash has the capacity for auto-completion as well. This will help you avoid a ridiculous number of typos.

If you start typing something bash will complete as far as it can, then will wait for you to complete the path, command or file name. If it can complete all the way, it will.

Let’s see this in action and start becoming keyboard heroes. keyboard heroes

Change into your home folder.

cd

Now to change back into your Practical_3 folder, type cd Pr without hitting enter. Instead hit your Tab key and bash will complete as far as it can. If you have setup your directories correctly, you should see this complete to cd Practical_ which is unfinished. You should have Practical_1 and Practical_2 in your home folder, so bash has gone as far as it can. Now it’s up to us to enter the final 3 before hitting Enter.

When faced with multiple choices, we can also hit the Tab key twice and bash will give us all available alernatives. Let’s see this in action by changing back to our home folder.

cd

Now type cd Pr and hit the Tab key twice and you will be shown all of the alternatives. You’ll till have to type the 3 though.

Another example which will complete all the way for you might be to go up one from your home folder.

cd
cd ..

Now to get back to your home directory (/shared/a1234567) start typing cd a followed by the Tab key. This should auto-complete for you and will save you making any errors. This also makes navigating your computer system very fast once you get the hang of it.

Importantly, if tab auto-completion doesn’t appear to be working, you’ve probably made a typo somewhere, or are not where you think you are. It’s a good check for mistakes.

Looking at the Contents of a Directory

There is another built-in command (ls) that we can use to list the contents (files and folders) of a directory. This is a way to get our familiar folder view in the terminal. Making sure you are in your home directory (cd ~), enter the ls command as it is and it will output and display the contents of the current directory.

ls

This is the list of files that we normally see in our traditional folder view that Windows and MacOS show us by default. We can actually check this output using RStudio too, so head to the Files tab in the Files window. Click on the Home icon (home) and look at the folders and files you can see there. Do they match the output from ls? Ask for help if not.

Alternatively, we can specify which directory we wish to view the contents of, without having to change into that directory. Notice you can’t do this using your classic GUI folder view. We simply type the ls command, followed by a space, then the directory we wish to view the contents of. To look at the contents of the root directory of the file system, we simply add that directory after the command ls.

ls /

Here you can see a whole raft of directories which contain the vital information for the computer’s operating system. Among them should be the /shared directory which is one level above your own home directory, and where the home directories for all users are located on our Linux system. Note that our system is a special case and most Linux systems have user home directories in /home, not /shared.

Have a look inside your Practical_1 directory. This is where you needed to have followed our instructions exactly in Week 1. If you didn’t create your directory exactly as we asked, you’ll have to figure this command out for yourself. Tab auto-completion may help you a little.

cd 
ls Practical_1

Navigate into this folder using the GUI view in RStudio and check that everything matches.

Question

Try to think of two ways we could inspect the contents of the / directory from your own home directory.

Creating a New Directory

Now we know how to move around and view the contents of a directory, we should learn how to create a new directory using bash instead of the GUI folder view you are used to. Navigate to your Practical_3 folder using bash.

cd ~/Practical_3

Now we are in a suitable location, let’s create a directory called test. To do this we use the mkdir command as follows:

mkdir test

You should see this appear in the GUI view, and if you now enter ls, you should also see this directory in your output.

Importantly, the mkdir command above will only make a directory directly below the one we are currently in as we have used a relative path. If automating this process via a script it is very important to understand the difference between absolute and relative paths, as discussed above.

Adding Options To Commands

So far, the commands we have used were given either without the use of any subsequent arguments, e.g. pwd and ls, or with a specific directory as the second argument, e.g. cd ../ and ls /. Many commands have the additional capacity to specify different options as to how they perform, and these options are often specified between the command name, and the file (or path) being operated on. Options are commonly a single letter prefaced with a single dash (-), or a word prefaced with two dashes (--). The ls command can be given with the option -l specified between the command and the directory and gives the output in what is known as long listing format.

Inspect the contents of your current directory using the long listing format. Please make sure you can tell the difference between the characters l (lower-case letter ‘l’) and 1 (number one).

ls -l

The above will give one or more lines of output, and one of the lines should be something similar to:

drwxrwxr-x 2 a1234567 a1234567 4096 Jul 19 06:59 test

where hh:mm is the time of file/directory creation.

The letter d at the beginning of the initial string of codes drwxrwxr-x indicates that this is a directory. These letters are known as flags which identify key attributes about each file or directory, and beyond the first flag (d) they appear in strict triplets. The first entry shows the file type and for most common files this entry will be -, whereas for a directory we will commonly see d.

Beyond this first position, the triplet of values rwx simply refer to who is able to read, write or execute the contents of the file or directory. These three triplets refer to 1) the file’s owner, 2) the group of users that the owner belongs to and 3) all users, and will only contain the values “r” (read), “w” (write), “x” (execute) or “-“ (not enabled). These are very helpful attributes for data security, protection against malicious software, and accidental file deletions.

The entries a1234567 a1234567 respectively refer to who is the owner of the directory (or file) and to which group of users the owner belongs. Again, this information won’t be particularly relevant to us today, but this type of information is used to control who can read and write to a file or directory. Finally, the value 4096 is the size of the directory structure in bytes, whilst the date and time refer to when the directory was created.

Let’s look in your home directory (~).

ls -l ~

This directory should contain numerous folders. A - instead of a d at the beginning of the initial string of flags indicates a file rather than a directory. On Ubuntu files and directories will also be displayed with different colours. Can you see only folders, or do you have any files present in your home directory?

There are many more options that we could specify to give a slightly different output from the ls command. Two particularly helpful ones are the options -h and -R. We could have specified the previous command as

ls -l -h ~

The -h option will change the file size to human-readable format, whilst leaving the remainder of the output unchanged. Try it and you will notice that where we initially saw 4096 bytes, the size is now given as 4.0K, and other file sizes will also be given in Mb etc. This can be particularly helpful for larger files, as most files in bioinformatics are very large indeed.

An additional option -R tells the ls command to look through each directory recursively. If we enter

ls -l -R ~

the output will be given in multiple sections. The first is what we have seen previously, but following that will be the contents of each sub-directory. It should become immediately clear that the output from setting this option can get very large and long depending on which directory you start from. It’s probably not a good idea to enter ls -l -R / as this will display the entire contents of your file system.

In the case of the ls command we can also glob all the above options together in the command

ls -lhR ~

This can often save some time, but it is worth noting that not all programmers write their commands in such a way that this convention can be followed. The built-in shell commands are usually fine with this, but many NGS data processing functions do not accept this convention.

How To Not Panic

It’s easy for things to go wrong when working in the command-line, but if you’ve accidentally:

there are some simple options for stopping a process and getting you back on track. Some options to try are:

Command Result
Ctrl+C Kill the current job
Ctrl+D End of input
Ctrl+Z Suspend current job

Ctrl+C is usually the first port of call when things go wrong. However, sometimes Ctrl+C doesn’t work but Ctrl+D or Ctrl+Z will.

Manuals and Help Pages

Accessing Manuals

In order to help us find what options are able to be specified, every command built-in to the shell has a manual, or a help page which can take some time to get familiar with. These help pages are displayed using the pager known as less which essentially turns the terminal window into a text viewer so we can display text in the terminal window, but with no capacity for us to edit the text, almost like primitive version of Acrobat Reader.

To display the help page for ls enter the command

man ls

As beforehand, the space between the arguments is important and in the first argument we are invoking the command man which then looks for the manual associated with the command ls. To navigate through the manual page, we need to know a few shortcuts which are part of the less pager.

Although we can navigate through the less pager using up and down arrows on our keyboards, some helpful shortcuts are:

Key Action
Enter go down one line
Spacebar go down one page (i.e. a screenful)
B go backwards one page
< go to the beginning of the document
> go to the end of the document
Q quit

Look through the manual page for the ls command.

Question

If we wanted to hide the group names in the long listing format, which extra options would we need set when searching our home directory?

We can also find out more about the less pager by calling it’s own man page. Type the command:

man less

and the complete page will appear. This can look a little overwhelming, so try pressing h which will take you to a summary of the shortcut keys within less. There are a lot of them, so try out a few to jump through the file.

A good one to experiment with would be to search for patterns within the displayed text by prefacing the pattern with a slash (/). Try searching for a common word like the or to to see how the function behaves, then try searching for something a bit more useful, like the word move.

Accessing Help Pages

As well as entering the command man before the name of a command you need help with, you can often just enter the name of the command with the options -h or --help specified. Note the convention of a single hyphen which indicates an individual letter will follow, or a double-hyphen which indicates that a word will follow. Unfortunately the methods can vary a little from command to command, so if one method doesn’t get you the manual, just try one of the others.

Sometimes it can take a little bit of looking to find something and it’s important to realise we won’t break the computer or accidentally launch a nuclear bomb when we look around. It’s very much like picking up a piece of paper to see what’s under it. If you don’t find something at first, just keep looking and you’ll find it eventually.

Questions

Try accessing the manual for the command man all the ways you can think of. Was there a difference in the output depending on how we asked to view the manual?

Could we access the help page for the command ls all three ways?

Some More Useful Tricks and Commands

A series of commands to look up

So far we have explored the commands pwd, cd, ls and man as well as the pager less. Inspect the man pages for the commands in the following table and fill in the appropriate fields. Have a look at the useful options and try to understand what they will do if specified when invoking the command. Write your answers on a piece of paper, or in a plain text file.

Command Description of function Useful options
man Display on-line manual -k
pwd Print working directory, i.e show where you are none commonly used
ls List contents of a directory -a, -h, -l
cd Change directory (scroll down in man builtins to find cd)
mv   -b, -f, -u
cp   -b, -f, -u
rm   -r (careful…)
mkdir   -p
cat    
less    
wc   -l
head   -n# (e.g., -n100)
tail   -n# (e.g., -n100)
echo   -e
cut   -d, -f, -s
sort    
uniq    
wget    
gunzip    
apropos   --usage

Putting It All Together

Now we’ve learned about a large number of commands, let’s try performing something useful. We’ll download a file from the internet, then look through the file. In each step remember to add the filename if it’s not given!

  1. Use the cd command to make sure you are in the directory Practical_3
  2. Use the command wget to download the gff file ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-89/gff3/drosophila_melanogaster/Drosophila_melanogaster.BDGP6.89.gff3.gz
  3. Now unzip this file using the command gunzip. (Hint: After typing gunzip, use tab auto-complete to add the file name.)
  4. Change the name of the file to dm6.gff using the command mv Drosophila_melanogaster.BDGP6.89.gff3 dm6.gff
  5. Look at the first 10 lines using the head command
  6. Change this to the first 5 lines using head -n5
  7. Look at the end of the file using the command tail
  8. Page through the file using the pager less
  9. Count how many lines are in the file using the command wc -l

Regular Expressions

Introduction

Regular expressions are a powerful and flexible way of searching for text strings amongst a large document or file. Most of us are familiar with searching for a word within a file, but regular expressions allow us to search for these with more flexibility, particularly in the context of genomics. We briefly saw this idea in the R practical using the functions str_extract() and str_replace(). Instead of searching strictly for a word or text string, we can search using less strict matching criteria. For example, we could search for a sequence that is either AGT or ACT by using the patterns A[GC]T or A(G|C)T. These two patterns will search for an A, followed by either a G or C, then followed strictly by a T. Similarly a match to ANNT can be found by using the patterns A[AGCT][AGCT]T or A[AGCT]{2}T. We’ll discuss that syntax below, so don’t worry if those patterns didn’t make much sense.

Whilst the bash shell has a great capacity for searching a file to matches to regular expressions, this is where languages like perl and python offer a great degree more power.

The command grep

The built-in command which searches using regular expressions in the terminal is grep, which stands for global regular expression print. This function searches a file or input on a line-by-line basis, so patterns contained within a line can be found, but patterns split across lines are more difficult to find. This can be overcome by using regular expressions in a programming language like Python or Perl.

The man grep page (grep --help | less for those without man pages) contains more detail on regular expressions under the REGULAR EXPRESSIONS header (scroll down a few pages).
As can be seen in the man page, the command follows the form grep [OPTIONS] 'pattern' filename

The option -E is preferable as it it stand for Extended, which we can also think of as Easier. As well as the series of conventional numbers and characters that we are familiar with, we can match to characters with special meaning, as we saw above where enclosing the two letters in brackets gave the option of matching either.

Special Character Meaning
\w match any letter or digit, i.e. a word character
\s match any white space character, includes spaces, tabs and end-of-line marks
\d match any digit from 0 to 9
. matches any single character
+ matches one or more of the preceding character (or pattern)
* matches zero or more of the preceding character (or pattern)
? matches zero or one of the preceding character (or pattern)
{x} or {x,y} matches x or between x and y instances of the preceding character
^ matches the beginning of a line (when not inside square brackets)
$ matches the end of a line
() contents of the parentheses treated as a single pattern
[] matches only the characters inside the brackets
[^] matches anything other than the characters in the brackets
| either the string before or the string after the “pipe” (use parentheses)
\ don’t treat the following character in the way you normally would.
This is why the first three entries in this table started with a backslash, as this gives them their “special” properties.
In contrast, placing a backslash before a . symbol will enable it to function as an actual dot/full-stop.

Pattern Searching

In this section we’ll learn the basics of using the grep command and what forms the output can take. Firstly, we’ll need to get the file that we’ll search in this section. First change into your test directory using the cd command, then enter the following, depending on your operating system:

cp ~/data/intro_bash/words words

Now page through the first few lines of the file using less to get an idea about what it contains.

Let’s try a few searches, and to get a feel for the basic syntax of the command, try to describe what you’re searching for on your notes BEFORE you enter the command. Do the results correspond with what you expected to see?

grep -E 'fr..ol' words

grep -E 'fr.[jsm]ol' words

grep -E 'fr.[^jsm]ol' words

grep -E 'fr..ol$' words

grep -E 'fr.+ol$' words

grep -E 'cat|dog' words

grep -E '^w.+(cat|dog)' words

In the above, we were changing the pattern to extract different results from the files. Now we’ll try a few different options to change the output, whilst leaving the pattern unchanged. If you’re unsure about some of the options, don’t forget to consult the man page.

grep -E 'louse' words

grep -Ew 'louse' words

grep -Ewn 'louse' words

grep -EwC2 'louse' words

grep -c 'louse' words

In most of the above commands we used the option -E to specify the extended version of grep. An alternative to this is to use the command egrep, which is the same as grep -E. Repeat a few of the above commands using egrep instead of grep -E.

We briefly covered the idea of capturing text in the R practical, however these operations in bash are beyond the scope of this course. To perform this we usually use the Stream EDitor sed. For those who are interested, there is a tutorial available at http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html.