Heading in the Right (Re)Direction
If you've taken the time to get the hang of terminal basics, you're probably at the point where you want to start putting together what you've learned. Sometimes issuing commands one at a time is enough, but there are cases when it can be tedious to enter command after command just to perform a simple task. This is where the extra symbols on your keyboard come in. For the shell, the terminal's command interpreter, those symbols are not wasted keys -- they're powerful operators that can link information together, split it apart, and much more.