A couple of years ago I bumped into an old schoolmate of mine, Morty. Now Morty was kind of a hardware geek. I mean stuff in hardware stores like nails, saws, electrical fixtures, ya know.

We'll Morty had an idea awhile ago, now that he a was a fully grown geek and had saved up a bunch of money from working in the nail factory. He wentinto the hardware store business.

And Morty knew I had had been working with "the computers" and thought I might know something about "the programs" and "the internets". See, Morty kinda lived in 1945 and only begrudgingly picked up these highly technical terms like "the computers" and "the internets".

Even though he wasn't happy about it he read in a a highly popular industry journal that hardware store proprietors where now expected to use "the internets" and "the computers".

So, upon seeing me he dove right into a campaign to play upon the very sliver of a relationship we had decades ago. He was trying to get me to do some free work for him. The fool.

I told him I could help him out, but he wasn't gonna get much for the price. Of course, he didn't hear that part and just launched into a tirade about how has structured his store, price his items organized all the bits and hardware bobs.

Now I'm kind of like, Whoa slow done Morty let me get the laptop out and we'll sit over on this bench over here. Hey, Morty you got about thirty minutes of a highly paid software developer's time for nothing so let's go through this in a highly ordered and structured way, you pain in the butt you.

BTW, I never really liked Morty after that time he shook my hand with a fully charged capacitor and shocked the hell out of me. I should really screw this little project up royally, huh? Payback.

Ok Mort. What you're getting for nothing is a project that contains a set of important files organized in a way that, hopefully, will make sense for your business. You'll be able to easily locate, organize, capture and generally manage the information that relates to your business.

No web applications, I charge money to people I sometimes like for that service. And you aren't paying me and, ahh, you know what I think about you after that shocking experience all those years ago.

First Morty, no,no stop talking, wait, wait the clock is ticking here. I'm going to ask you a set of targeted questions about you business domain, the hardware stores, and you're going to answer in the breif way.

What am I doing this for?

Now let's get onto the job of helping Mort out.

First Morty, what are the departments in your store?

He tells me "Lawn and Garden", Plumbing, Electrical, Tools and Hardware.

And what kinds of products are in each department?

Lawn and Garden - Patio furniture, Hoses, Rakes, Shovels. Plumbing - Toilets, Sinks, Tube and Showers, Pipes, Fittings, Solder Electrical - Fuses, Lighting, Batteries, Switches, Wiring. Tools - Hand Tools, Power Tools, Wet/Dry Vacuums, Work Benches. Hardware - Door and Window, Fasteners.

Ok, Morty you're gonna the work here because I'm outa here in about 25 minutes and I don't want to see your face for another 35 years, haha. No really, I'm not kidding.

• Let's open up the terminal to get a command line interface(CLI) we can work in.

** Clicking in the hour glass in the upper-right side of window, in the menu up there. Then type 'terminal' and hit return.

** Alternatively, you can type: CMD-Space To bring up Spotlight search. Enter "terminal" with no quotes and hit return. To start the terminal program.

Good, now Morty this is where real developers do a lot, I mean a lot of their work. And you might like this because it's a little closer to the time warp your living in. It's been around since probably the sixties, I've been using it since 1976 myself.

• Let's see where in the computer's file system we are?

(Note: the command to type will be preceded by the '$' character And the command's output, if shown, will be preceded by the '=>' characters)

$ pwd => /Users/tdyer

This will show you what the "present working directory" is. You might of heard directories called folders. It what one uses to organize files in the computer's file system.

Oh, look the "present working directory" is my home, or default, directory. We're seeing the "absolute path" of my home directory.

*** Absolute path An absolute path shows one the location of the files and directories with the system's file system. Absolute paths:

• Always start with a leading slash, '/'
• Are relative to the root directory of the file system.

*** Root directory Is the top level directory in the tree structure of the filesystem.

• Open up the Finder and go to the root directory of your filesystem.

• Find you're home directory in the filesystem. Hint: use the absolute file path returned from the pwd above to find this.

• Lets start a project for your store Morty by organizing all your project files into it's own directory.

$ mkdir MortStore

** This will make a directory named "MortStore" in my home directory. See mkdir is "make directory", amazing!

• Lets change into the "root", or top directory of your project. Not the root of the filesystem, the root of this new project.

$ cd MortStore

** This will "change directory" into the MortStore. This will hold all the files and such for your project.

• Let's see what the contents of this directory are.

$ ls

** This will "list" all the files and subdirectories in the MortStore directory. None yet.

• Let's create a README file that will be a high level description of this project.

$ touch README

** This will create an empty file named README if one doesn't already exist.

• Let's look all files our project, only the empty README right now.

$ ls => README $ ls -l => -rw-r--r-- 1 tdyer staff 0 Sep 25 01:55 README

** 'ls -l' will list the contents of the current directory in "long" form. It show the permissions to the files and directories, -rw-r--r--. Followed by number of links, 1, owner name, tdyer, group name, staff, number of bytes in file, 0, last modified date and time.

(From here on out we are going to use BOTH the command line and Sublime to view the project and possible modify the project).

• Look at and modify our project using the Sublime Text Editor. $ subl .

** This will run the Sublime Text Editor for you project. The dot, '.', after subl represents the current directory we're working in. So we're opening Sublime in the current directory which will show us Morty's project.

*** 'Dot' directory The dot, '.' directory is a reference to the current directory your working in.

• Add the below to the README file and save it.

Morty's Hardware Lawn and Garden - Patio furniture, Hoses, Rakes, Shovels. Plumbing - Toilets, Sinks, Tube and Showers, Pipes, Fittings, Solder Electrical - Fuses, Lighting, Batteries, Switches, Wiring. Tools - Hand Tools, Power Tools, Wet/Dry Vacuums, Work Benches. Hardware - Door and Window, Fasteners.

• Go back to the Terminal and show the contents of the root directory. $ pwd $ ls $ ls -l => -rw-r--r-- 1 tdyer staff 306 Sep 25 02:18 README $ cat README

** cat will print the contents of the file README. This is just to check that you modified the right file.

• Create subdirectories for each department.

$ mkdir LawnGarden $ mkdir Plumbing $ mkdir Electrical $ mkdir Tools $ mkdir Hardware

• View all files in your project

$ ls -lR

** -R will recurse through all the subdirectories and run ls -l to show all the files and subdirectories of the current directory.

• Determine that the view your seeing from ls -lR EXACTLY matches with the view of your project your seeing in Sublime.

• In Sublime create a file that will track the inventory for each department.

The files will be named inventory.txt and there contents will be a comma seperated file (CSV).

** In LawnGarden/inventory.csv

Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month Shovel, 1, 11,74.33,13 Rake,2,5,35.99,0.5 Hose,3,19,16.99,3

** In Plumbing/inventory.csv: Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month Toilet,4,3,249.99,1 Solder,5,88,5.99,33 Sinks,6,5,299.99,.2

** In Electrical/inventory.csv: Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month Fuses,7,1024,1.99,640 Batteries,8,100,4.99,204 Switchs,9,29,14.50,18

** In Tools/inventory.csv: Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month Hand Saw,10,9,77.99,2 Drill,11,67,34.99,15 Wet Vac,12,2,114.50,0.1

• Now create a file in each directory that will capture the current employees working in each department.

** In LawnGarden/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role Jack Sprat,978-251-2384,[email protected],manager Moe Brown,617-589-8977,[email protected], associate

** In Plubming/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role Brian Behan,978-668-2344,[email protected],manager Richy Havens,617-812-7312,[email protected], associate

** In Electrical/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role Joy Gillis,978-238-9894,[email protected],manager Laura Havens,617-763-5542,[email protected], associate

** In staff.csv: Name,Phone,Email,Role Tom Smith,888-989-777,[email protected], associate Meg Brown,978-453-8984,[email protected],manager

• Run ls -R and check it against the structure of your project shown in Sublime. Should be the same.

• Oops, looks like the last staff file we created was in the root of the directory. Lets move it into the Tools directory.

$pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir) $ mv inventory.csv Tools/.

• Create a notice.txt file in each directory to communicate with the employees in each department.

$ pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir) $ touch notice.txt $ mv notice.txt Tools/. $ cp Tools/notice.txt Electrical/. $ cp Tools/notice.txt Plumbing/read_this.txt (have to tell the plumbers to actual read the contents, hmmm) $

• Ok now I want to find all the staff CSV files in my project. $ pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir) $ find . -name '*.csv'

This will look for any file that ends in .csv in the current directory and all descendent directories.

Look for these files in Sublime using it's file search features.

• We forgot what department Jack Sprat works in. Lets find out.

$ pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir) $ ack "Jack Sprat"