A lot of the tricks here are using the shell builtins. Pretty much all the nifty stuff you can do with that are in your shell man page. If you are using bash, t

A lot of the tricks here are using the shell builtins. Pretty much all the nifty stuff you can do with that are in your shell man page. If you are using bash, try typing man bash. Read it. There is also stuff in there about scripting bash. This is worth knowing, because short one liners are very nice for moving a bunch of files around or whatever else. I use one liners every day. Make sure you read about job control in your shell. It helps understanding the why's and whats of some of the other tricks. Learn to use pipes. On the cli, I use Bash, sed, awk, and grep a lot, and with pipes you can do amazing things relative to the windows world. It's a very useful skill. Learn a scripting language. I tend to use perl because I can pipe into it or break into a move involved script, whichever I prefer. I personally find Python less suited for this, but I've heard that Ruby is a good sysadmin language too. You don't have to learn how to be a grand wizard, but any serious unix person should know one. It helps greatly with productivity. Edit: Forgot to add, learn find (man find). This, in combo with xargs, is very, very useful.