Little things matter. I’m often amazed of how I can feel I mastered a certain tool or technology, only to discover I’ve missed some basic way of using it. It happened to me on Windows a couple of weeks ago when I discovered cool keyboard shortcuts, like Win+E (which opens My Computer), or on Eclipse when I found out there is a menu that finds everything. On Linux, I’ve found that this happens all the time. Now, finding out how to use awk or sed is one thing, and it requires learning a complicated tool. But there are a lot of little things that are so easy to pick up, that it’s a shame that people miss them. Playing around with directories is so common in a Unix shell, and there are so many tricks you can use.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://amir.rachum.com/blog/2013/01/05/moving-around-with-bash/