In the chapter Chapter 1, Basic UNIX System Concepts, you were shown how to launch a shell. In this chapter, we will show you how to work with it.
The shell's main asset is the number of existing utilities: there are thousands of them, and each one is devoted to a particular task. We will only look at a (very) small number of them here. One of UNIX's greatest assets is the ability to combine these utilities, as we shall see later.