MadBuntu

IBM developerworks has a ton of useful information.  I recently came across two great and related articles that might be of interest to readers of this blog.  These two articles describe the steps to take you out of the basic command line functionality into power user territory.

The first article “Learn 10 Good Unix Usage Habits“:

• Make directory trees in a single swipe.
• Change the path; do not move the archive.
• Combine your commands with control operators.
• Quote variables with caution.
• Use escape sequences to manage long input.
• Group your commands together in a list.
• Use xargs outside of find .
• Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
• Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
• Stop piping cats.

The other article expands on it “Learn 10 More Good Unix Usage Habits” :

• Use file name completion.
• Use history expansion.
• Reuse previous arguments.
• Manage directory navigation with pushd and popd.
• Find large files.
• Create temporary files without an editor.
• Use the curl command-line utility.
• Make the most of regular expressions.
• Determine the current user.
• Process data with awk.