No, probably more on the scale of months. In my case it was years, but I was an intermittent and resentful user. I'd say ignore the people who recommend man pa

No, probably more on the scale of months. In my case it was years, but I was an intermittent and resentful user. I'd say ignore the people who recommend man pages; they're pretty much the worst form of documentation out there. The first thing they show you is a cartesian product of all switches, which can do nothing but serve to confuse you. After that, they list the switches an alphabetical order, which is useful only as a reference after you already understand the command. It's true, you can search in the man page, but you have to already know the technical term for what you searching for. Your question may be "How can I do X with Y command?" which man pages often don't help. The are only reference pages for those who already know the commands. Better ways to learn are to search the internet, specifically the awesome unix.stackexchange.com, and best yet work with someone who knows more than you who wants to help you. At my workplace, there are several Linux experts, and we regularly chat about ways to accomplish our problems in the shell. Once you learn them, you will enable yourself to do very very powerful things that would take special commands in special apps, which you have to download, install, and perhaps purchase. Such as grepping an entire codebase for a string, as a small example. Learning a unix shell is like learning a programming language that works on pipes. There is a hump to get over, and once you do, you will be able to express precisely what you want to with your computer. As far as you're concerned, it's the language of the operating system, allowing you absolute control. Because of my awesome co-workers, I now work daily, productively, in the shell. I use cygwin on windows to develop on remote and virtualized unix environments, and the experience is seamless.