Some commands form the backbone of daily shell work: grep, sed, awk, cut, sort, uniq, xargs, find, and tar are indispensable for searching, transforming, and moving data. curl or wget handle HTTP interactions, while jq complements JSON parsing. For quick file inspection use head, tail, and less; for process management use ps, top/htop, and kill. Combining small commands with pipes and redirection (|, >, 2>) is a superpower—learn to build pipelines and prefer tools that explicitly handle the data formats you work with. Pro tip: practice with tiny one-liners and then turn repeated ones into small scripts; sharing your favorite commands on the forum usually sparks great improvements.