Long forgotten skill

4 min readSep 18, 2020

I took 6 units of computer science when I was an undergraduate student. Those were introduction to python programming and Object oriented Programming. I should be no stranger to command line coding, and especially not a stranger to python. However, as fate have it, having no avenue to practice all those sleepless coding nights, it’s as if it never happened to me.

As I take this journey towards the much yearned Data Science career, I am tasked to retrace my steps and relearn python coding. I’m ecstatic to find out that while I can not recreate the codes on my own, I can actually understand them if I read them. The python syntax is still flickering a bit in my mind.

Following the video I was watching, I saw how to declare variables and how to import items in your code (key: pandas!!!) So where do I start my coding? of course, to print Hello World!

So moving on, I also declared variables and had them print

But I remember, back then I was able to ask inputs from users whenever I’m adding something. I want to try that again but my brain failed me. Luckily, my trusty friend stack over flow came through, although it is definitely not the function I’m expecting and I’m hoping I could remember how i did it before, but nevertheless i got to ask user inputs to have a sum! (however I can’t concatenate the text and the variable sum :( )

I really do have to take a crash course to Python. I can’t make my former knowledge work anymore. Let’s check if I still remember the command prompt. This is where we load our codes back then

So the content of the video is quite unfamiliar with me us we have not maneuvered cmd before (except cd). So in the tutorial vids, I learned several things:

DIR — lists all the items in the directory

You can also use DIR without changing the current directory

2. rmdir and mkdir — removes and makes directories

rmdir /s — removes everything in the directory, including all of the directories it contains

3. Tree — displays everything inside the directory including the directories inside of those directories and so on, in a tree form. This one is pretty cool and I found out that I have a lot of items in my C drive and it did not stop for 3 minutes until I hit CTRL C.

4. Color — my favorite! I get to change colors in cmd and I am fond of the matrix team as it feels like I am a master hacker.

5. Attrib — shows the attributes in the directory. You can also change the attributes of files.

6. Del — deletes files

7. Echo > — you can use echo to create a file, with text that was indicated in the echo. Double greater than (>) sign will not overwrite the file and just append the additional text you input.