Overview

Setting up some aliases

In your terminal, do the following:

$ cd

$ ls -l

$ ll

ll should have output the same thing as ls -l. Why does it work this way? This is because the HMS-RC folks have internally setup what is called an alias.

A shell alias is a shortcut to reference a command. It can be used to avoid typing long commands. For common patterns it can reduce keystrokes and improve efficiency. A simple example is setting default options on commands to avoid having to type them each time a command is run.

For example suppose that because you are just starting out on the cluster, and you prefer to confirm deleting a file before using the rm command. Remember that the rm command supports this with the -i option. To avoid forgetting to use the -i option each time, an alias can be created so that each time rm is run it will use the -i option and prompt the user to confirm.

$ alias rm='rm -i'

However, this alias is only going to be available to you while that Terminal window is open. If you wanted to use that alias all the time, what would you do?

You would add it to ~/.bashrc! Let’s open ~/.bashrc and add a few commands to it. At the bottom of the file you should see a header titled “User specific aliases”. Under that header go ahead and add the alias.

$ vim ~/.bashrc

Add in a line at the end of your .bashrc file:

alias rm='rm -i'

Now, we can source the .bashrc file for the alias to take effect and we can try it out. You should see the question ` remove draft.txt? and here you can answer n` for No.

$ source ~/.bashrc

$ rm  ~/unix_lesson/other/draft.txt

As we mentioned, aliases are super helpful for long commands that we are repeatedly having to tyoe out. A good example of this is the srun command for starting and interactive session. First exit the interactive session and get on a login node, if you are not there already.

$ alias o2i='srun --pty -p interactive -t 0-12:00 --mem 2G --reservation=HBC /bin/bash'

Now you can test it out!

$ o2i

Similar to what we did above, you can put this (or a similar) command in the .bash_profile file so it is available when you log on next time.

.bashrc versus .bash_profile

.bash_profile is executed for login shells, while .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells. When you login (type username and password) to O2 the .bash_profile is executed. So if you want the alias available only when you login, you will want to put it in your .bash_profile.

Copying files to and from the cluster

So far we have used FileZilla to copy files over from O2, but there are other way to do so using the command line interface. When you obtain your data from the sequencing facility, it will likely be stored on some remote computer and they will give you login credentials which will allow you to access it. There are various commands that can be used to help you copy those files from the remote computer over to 1) your local computer, 2) O2, or 3) whatever cluster environment you plan to work on. We present a few options here.

scp

Similar to the cp command to copy there is a command that allows you to securely copy files between computers. The command is called scp and allows files to be copied to, from, or between different hosts. It uses ssh for data transfer and provides the same authentication and same level of security as ssh.

In the example below, the first argument is the location on the remote server and the second argument is the destination on your local machine.

You can also do this in the opposite direction by swapping the arguments.

$ scp username@transfer.rc.hms.harvard.edu:/path/to/file_on_O2 Path/to/directory/local_machine

Let’s try copying over the README file from your unix_lesson folder. First open up a new terminal window. Look and see where you currently are:

$ pwd

Then type in:

$ scp rc_trainingXX@transfer.rc.hms.harvard.edu:~/unix_lesson/other/draft.txt  .

Now see that the file has transferred over:

$ less draft.txt

NOTE: Windows users may encounter a permissions error when using scp to copy over locally. We are not sure how to troubleshoot this, but will update materials as we obtain more information.

rsync

rsync is used to copy or synchronize data between directories. It has many advantages over cp, scp etc. It works in a specific direction, i.e. from the first directory to the second directory, similar to cp.

Salient Features of rsync

You can run the checksum function yourself when transferring large datasets without rsync using one of the following commands (or similar): md5, md5sum.

Between directories on the same machine

#DO NOT RUN
$ rsync -av ~/large_dataset/. /n/groups/dir/groupdata/

Between different machines

When copying over large datasets to or from a remote machine, rsync works similarly to scp.

#DO NOT RUN
$ rsync -av -e ssh testfile username@transfer.rc.hms.harvard.edu:~/large_files/

More helpful information and examples using rsync can be found at this link

Please do not use O2’s login nodes for transferring large datasets (like fastq files) between your computer and O2 with rsync or scp. Instead, use the transfer nodes ssh eCommons@transfer.rc.hms.harvard.edu.

Symbolic Links or “sym links”

Symbolic links are like shortcuts you may create on your laptop. A sym link makes it appear as if the linked object is actually there. It can be useful to access a file from multiple locations without creating copies and without using much disk space. (Symlinks are only a few bytes in size.)

Let’s check out an example of a folder with lots of symlinks.

ls -l /n/app/bcbio/tools/bin/

Now, let’s create a sym link in our home directory for the same unix_lesson folder we had originally copied over.

$ cd

$ ln -s /n/groups/hbctraining/unix_lesson/ unix_lesson_sym

$ ls -l

We recommend that you create something like this for your raw data so it does not accidentally get corrupted or overwritten.

Note: a “hard” link (just ln without the -s option) is very different. Always use “ln -s” unless you really know what you’re doing!

Additional topics

If you are interested in learning more about regular expressions (regex) and the tools awk and sed1, you can find more information in the “extra_bash_tools” lesson.

This lesson has been developed by members of the teaching team at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC). These are open access materials distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.