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This issue we asked our experts:

We’re Jedi mastering the terminal, what’s your most useful/ favourite command line tool or trick that everyone should master?

Jonni Bidwell

Ctrl-R is much more useful than using the cursor keys to search your Bash history. Then there are the laconic curly brace expansions. It would be nice to understand the effect of putting slashes at the end of directory names in an rsync command too, but this is a secret that mere mortals cannot behold.

Neil Bothwick

Without a doubt it’s a terminal multiplexer like tmux or screen. Until you have tried using one of these, and got over the initial learning hump, you will never want to do without them. While I find that screen is the best known multiplexer, I find tmux is more capable and no harder to learn, so why not give it a try.

Les Pounder

For me it’s the handy && conditional operator. It means that if the first command completes correctly, then a further command can be chained to it. For example sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade will update the repos, and then show all the upgrades for my system, prompting me to install them.

Mayank Sharma

There really is no end to the awesomeness that one can achieve with the sed utility and awk programming language. If you intend to spend time working in the terminal, mastering these two is as important as learning to make sense of

dmesg, and identifying devices with commands such as lsusb and lspci.

Alexandar Tolstoy

There are so many to choose from. It’s hard to know where to begin. But if I must, one of my favourite bookmarked commands is $ cat content.xml | perl -p -e “s/<[^>]*>/ /g;s/\n/ /g;s/ +/ /;. This little puppy enables me to read an unzipped ODT file in those situations where I don’t have LibreOffice to hand.