Introduction to the Command Line and Web Data Fundamentals for Music Researchers: Key Points

Introduction

This lesson introduces the basics of working on the command-line alongside some fundamentals of working with web data
It is in “pre-alpha” stage, and is a work-in-progress.

cp copies data from one location (a source) to another (a target)
cp takes its source(s) and target as arguments
mkdir can be used to create directories
mv can be used to move data from one location to another, and is similar to copying followed by deletion
cp and mv modify your files, and can lead to data loss

Web servers provide remote resources to clients, most commonly browsers, using the HTTP protocol
URLs are the “addresses” of the web, and they specify the location of a remote resource for the purposes of retrieval
Most websites today consist of resources of a variety of file formats, and each remote resource usually demands its own HTTP request and has its own URL associated with it
We can inspect the torrent of HTTP requests that websites require by using most modern browser’s Developer Tools