Best Unix Tricks?
silentbicycle: Read man pages and "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike. It's old, but conveys the design principles behind Unix, particularly how to write little tools that work well with all the others. "The Art of Unix Programming" is also good, despite Eric S. Raymond's getting on a soapbox all the time.The 4.4 BSD supplementary books (PSD, USD, SMM, etc.) are full of major documentation, with chapters on vi, awk, cc, yacc, gprof, etc. They're very old-school. (OpenBSD installs them with its default documentation, I think FreeBSD does as well.) Some parts will be obsolete, but the big ideas are the same. For example, it covers lex and yacc better in about ten pages each than the O'Reilly book could in twenty times that. Same with make, and several other major parts in the Unix toolchain.For starters, learn to use: apropos, cron, the basics of sed and awk, the shebang, a real editor, screen or tmux, tar, gzip, and find. Read man pages, see where they lead you. Try to automate stuff, and go spelunking in the infrastructure for whatever Unix distro you use.I also found that I learned a LOT by getting away from stuff that assumed Linux. Soooo much Linux newbie stuff is written by people who only know Linux (and may use GNOME for most things, really). You don't really learn Unix that way. Also, watch out for people who assume that bash is the standard shell. (A pet peeve of mine.)