Almost immediately after declaring a hiatus seems like a great time for a blog post.
Inspired by nina de jesus and Ruth Tillman's libtech level up project, here's something on the value of command-line text processing. Some of these common UNIX tools that have been around since practically the 1980s are great for the sort of data wrangling that many librarians find themselves doing, whether their responsibilities lie with systems, the web, metadata, or other areas. But the command prompt has a learning curve and if you already use text editor tools to accomplish some tasks, it might be tough to see why you should invest in learning. Here's one case I've found.
Scenario: our digital repository needs to maintain several vocabularies of faculty who teach in different departments. That information is, of course, within a siloed vendor product that has no viable APIs. I'm only able to export CSVs that looks like this:
"Namerer, Name","username"
"Othern