Learning the Terminal in Linux

As more people began to understand they have more options then Windows a number of new GNU/Linux users have sprung up.  For a lot of us the time comes when we begin to use the Terminal.  My first experiences with the Terminal involved coping and pasting commands I found on blogs and forums. The time came to when I wanted to know what it was I was doing.  One place I have found useful is LinuxCommand.org. LinuxCommand.org has but together a nice site to get the novice Terminal user up to speed. If you are looking for help with the Command Line or would like to expand your knowledge check them out. Why do you need to learn the command line anyway? Well, let me tell you a story. Not long ago we had a problem where I used to work. There was a shared drive on one of our file servers that kept getting full. I won't mention that this legacy operating system did not support user quotas; that's another story. But the server kept getting full and stopping people from working. One of the software engineers in our company spent the better part of a day writing a C++ program that would look through the directories of all the users and add up the space they were using and make a listing of the results. Since I was forced to use the legacy OS while I was on the job, I installed a version of the bash shell that works on it. When I heard about the problem, I realized I could do all the work this engineer had done with this single line: