In this crash course (~1h) I will explain some interesting operations that can be done on Linux, Mac and recent Windows systems without requiring installation of any specific software - just using the standard command-line utilities provided by these systems: shell scripting (e.g. if/for, grep, sed, column, seq, expr, cut, paste, join, sort...) and the "awk" line-processing tool (which is very powerful - even allowing to mimic some SQL-like operations). I will illustrate this through some examples, like the analysis of log files from a data processing software, and the analysis, formatting and basic statistics from Gaia DR2 CSV files. The results can then be visualized through other software like e.g. gnuplot or topcat.