JDB is a package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from shell scripts. JDB is useful to process medium amounts of data (with very little data you'd do it by hand, with megabytes you might want a real database). JDB is very good at doing things like: * extracting measurements from experimental output * re-examining data to address different hypotheses * joining data from different experiments * eliminating/detecting outliers * computing statistics on data (mean, confidence intervals, histograms, correlations) * reformatting data for graphing programs Rather than hand-code scripts to do each special case, JDB provides higher-level functions. JDB is built on flat-ASCII databases. By storing data in simple text files and processing it with pipelines it is easy to experiment (in the shell) and look at the output.