One thing I find very useful is tab completion. When typing into a terminal it's important to be accurate. When typing for example a file name start with the path and then press tab to complete the path. For example
Code:
$ ls Doc <TAB>
#changes to
$ ls Documents/
#or
$ ls D <TAB>
#nothing happens
<TAB> #again lists possible completions
$ ls D <TAB> <TAB>
Documents/ Downloads/ Desktop/
Using this , it improves your accuracy as you move from directory to directory helping to avoid typos. It can also help speed up changing directories or typing out long file paths. It also automatically escapes characters like '?,!' and whitespace, " " in filenames.
Code:
$ ls
backlight hdmi openbox-pypanel.sh update-git document 1
# the contents of a directory
#the cat command can output the contents of a file.
#pretend you want to `cat' document 1
$ cat document 1
cat: document: No such file or directory
cat: 1: No such file or directory
# cat sees those as two files, so you have to tell it that its all one filename by escaping the space with the "\" character
$ cat document\ 1
contents of document 1
#or
$ cat doc <TAB>
#changes to
$ cat document\ 1
contents of document 1
Like stated above, read the sticky post about it.
Scripting is also nice to be able to do, it can help speed up more complicated processes that you do often. And it's fun!
Best of luck
Kopkins
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