Unix
The greatest benefit of Unix to me has been its pervasiveness, it has made it possible for me to move between organisations without having to learn another operating system before I can work on the databases.
This is mainly about the shell - because that's what I use to do everything outside the database. I have avoided using 'C' type shells, so this is about Bourne style shells, Korn, Z and of course bash.
bash
My favourite feature is 'disown'. This allows you to start a huge database export at lunch time, realise you should have run it in a 'nohup' hours later and to disown it instead, so that when you log out it doesn't get terminated.
There will be more about shell matters later!
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