Graphical environments for Linux have come a long way in the past few years. You can be as productive as you'd like in the X Window System, without ever having to open a shell prompt.
So why spend the time learning how to accomplish tasks from the shell prompt? For one thing, you can work faster. In the time it might take you to open the file manager in GNOME or KDE, then locate a directory, then create, delete or modify files, you could have finished your work with several commands from a shell prompt.
In this section, we'll show you how you can move around (without getting lost), manipulate files, perform some basic administration tasks and more. All the work can be performed from within an Xterm window, too, so it won't be necessary to forsake the GUI to work faster from the shell prompt.