Before, I have posted here a few basic Linux terminal commands that I think are essential for newbies to know. I've also shared some deadly ones that should be avoided at all costs.

CMus (also called C* Music Player) is a ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server. CMus is very powerful and highly configurable, and it features Vi-like commands and keyboard shortcuts which can be bound to other keys if needed. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 (with libmad), WAV, AAC or WMA.

If you use sudo to run commands as root, you've probably run into “permission denied” problems when only part of a pipeline or part of a command is running with root permissions.

A shell is a command interpreter which allows the user to interact with the computer. The way things work is simple: the user types in commands, the shell interprets them and performs the tasks it was asked to do, and finally it sends the result to the standard output (which is usually the screen). For example, the output of the ls command can be something like:

Overview of 7 interesting command-line tools to use while working in a shell.

With the proliferation of XML-based formats, it is nice to have tools that manipulate XML documents in the traditional Unix-like fashion, as the good old grep, sed, and other tools do for plain text.

One thing that gets debated over and over in Linux is the need for the command line. Linux shell is one of the things that makes Linux so great.

!whatever:p, sudo !!, ^foo^bar ... if they whet your appetite and set your pulse racing do I have a web site for you! It’s the Digg or Reddit of the Linux command-line world.