Chapter 5 Final Thoughts
The Unix shell is one of the most productive programming environments ever created — maybe even the most productive. Its syntax may be cryptic, but people who have mastered it can experiment with different commands interactively, then use what they have learned to automate their work. Graphical user interfaces may be better at the first, but the shell is still unbeaten at the second. And as Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1911:
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
I hope you have found this Introduction to the UNIX Command Line guidebook to be useful. But realize this is just a beginning–there is more to learn. After working through these lessons, you may want to continue your command line journey by exploring additional topics and skills, such as:
- combining multiple simple commands together to perform powerful and complex tasks using pipes and filters,
- performing the same commands on many different things (such as files) using loops,
- solving complex problems by creating custom scripts, and
- connecting to other computers and transfering files using remote login and file transfer utilities.
Computer productivity, efficiency, power, and control await, so have fun and best of luck!