It's not just from the command line that these shortcuts are useful. Once you have a decent baseline on shell scripting fundamentals, the constructs are often

It's not just from the command line that these shortcuts are useful. Once you have a decent baseline on shell scripting fundamentals, the constructs are often highly optimized towards efficient and readable scripts. Not having to put every command in quotes, for example, is a huge advantage all by itself, especially if any argument lists have quoted arguments. The $(...) construct is pretty fundamental to bash scripting and should be covered in any decent tutorial.