The linux shell is probably the most important thing that provides raw power to the end user. Getting to know more about it is crucial if we seek to be able to do simple and more complicated tasks with its help. The bash shell, which is what 99% of linux users use, contains a certain environment that a user works under.
The world of Unix is a place where everything is done the right way, till there is an even “righter” way to do it. For everything that gets coded, there is always something left to be edited. Almost every project in the Linux (or other unix related OS) community is based on patches. There are even quite a lot of patches for the linux kernel itself.
Teaching an old dog new tricks is definately not an easy task. People are used to doing the same things over and over and since learning can be a quite tedious activity, they most times don’t take the time and effort to elaborate a bit in order to harvest some goods out of that process. Don’t take that personally because i am probably the one that does that more than a lot.
I remember that back in the days that i started to learn more about the different linux/unix tools, i was fascinated by the great wget http downloader. Believe me, you will end up using this one quite a lot, even just for means of running a cron to update a website or for some more interesting stuff, like downloading a whole website.
You may be thinking why we need to count words, lines or bytes as you read the title of this post. Actually, if you think a bit about it, you will see that it is quite useful to use a command like wc (no, it does not mean Water Cabinet, rather means something like Word Count).