<story><title>Explorations in Unix</title><url>http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>frankc</author><text>I use unix in the same way and for the same purpose as the described in the blog, but I have come to the opinion that once you get into the describe and visualize phase, it&apos;s much easier to just drop into R.  Reading in the kind of file being worked on here is often as simple as&lt;p&gt;foo &amp;#60;-read.csv(&quot;foo.csv&quot;)&lt;p&gt;Getting summary descriptive statistics, item counts, scatter plots and histograms is often as easy as&lt;p&gt;summary(foo)&lt;p&gt;table(foo$col)&lt;p&gt;plot(foo$xcol, foo$ycol)&lt;p&gt;hist(foo$col).&lt;p&gt;I think that is lot simpler than a 4 or 5 command pipeline that can be mistake-prone to edit when you want to change column names or things like that.  I still do these kinds of things in the shell sometimes, and I don&apos;t know if I can put my finger on when exactly I would drop into R vs write out a pipeline, but there IS a line somewhere...</text></comment>
<story><title>Explorations in Unix</title><url>http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mpyne</author><text>I almost skipped because I figured it would be another introductory article to how to use bash and coreutils, but this was actually very good.</text></comment>