The Unix shell is older than most of the people who use it. It has survived so long because it is one of the most productive programming environments ever created—maybe even the most productive. Its syntax may be cryptic, but people who have mastered it can experiment with different commands interactively, then use what they have learned to automate their work.
history
command can be used to view and repeat previous operations, while tab completion can be used to save re-typing.grep
to find things in files, and find
to find files themselves.