Fetch!
A student in our group asked whether it was possible to open a .bam file located on a remote site and process it locally without having to download it. While it's possible to do that in general with a some programming trickery, unless you have some sort of special access it's usually better to download a large file and deal with it locally. If you have ssh access and reasonable connection speed to the site containing the file, you can mount the directory as a local file system and access files as if they reside on your computer. On Linux, you can use sshfs . On a Mac, there is oxfuse , an sshfs client for Mac OS-X. For Windows, there is win-sshfs . After connecting to a remote site with one of these programs, the remote directory appears as a local path. You pay a performance price for operating on files across the internet, but often convenience overrides the performance hit. Rather than directly accessing the file across the net, let's look at a simpler problem. Find...