This workshop concluded on March 28, 2023. The workshop materials are available here.

This workshop is for biological researchers who would like to learn to use the command line for searching and fetching NCBI data. In this workshop, we will begin with an introduction to working in a command line environment and then show you how to use the EDirect suite to access data programmatically from several NCBI databases.

You do not need to have had prior experience with the command line, but we do recommend that you have some familiarity with NCBI databases get the most of this workshop.

In this workshop you will learn how to:

• Write Bash commands with parameters
• Download and store data files in an organized directory structure
• Construct search queries using NCBI’s EDirect to search in a specific database, link to related data in another database, and download selected information.
• Chain together multiple command line calls in a reusable workflow which can quickly and reproducibly access the latest information.

Please see our FAQs page for more information and if you still have questions about the NCBI Outreach Events program or this specific workshop, email us at workshops@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov .