I used to think that command line was just for nerds---I mean, when you have a mouse, icons to click on, search boxes and scroll bars, why would you go back to the bad old days of hand-typing text commands to search for a file or launch an application?

Then I started developing websites and realized that the webservers I was renting space on to serve up my sites didn't have nice icons to click on. Like most webservers, they were bare bones and didn't have a graphic user interface. To configure my servers or tell them to do much of anything, I needed to learn a few textual commands.

The majority of servers that you'll encounter will respond to a set of commands used in the Linux operating system. In his article, "Introduction to Linux Commands," programmer and server guru Paul Tero explains why it's valuable to know some Linux commands and shows how to login to your web server, search for files, change permissions, backup your site, and more just by typing text commands.