From reading I definitely feel like a super-novice to everybody but just as a note to those who may be in my realm (and because I want to try to participate more since everyone has been so helpful her) I wanted to mention that since I started working through blfs I also just learned how to use wilcards in bash and it has changed my life!!!

I'm sure for the sabios here its basic but figuring out that I can type cd lin* instead of the the whole damn line and or rm [bz2] or whatever has been a godsend to somebody like me who spends most of my time buthcering animals not typing!!!!!

Also coming across this one to tar the whole directory.

for i in *.bz2; do tar -jxf $i; done

I'm sure alot of y'all have whole scripts for all this stuff and expecially in blfs they talk you through some which I've modified a little now to help me out in other places but for early new LFS users I wish I would've thought of it then!

Probably a dumd post but its all I got for now and I'm sure many folks can post some other time and keystroke saving hints that become more apparent in blfs but that could really help knowing in starting LFS.

Thanks again!!!!

When you partially type a filename, pressing Tab will automatically complete it. This is probably a better approach because it can't accidentally expand to two filenames or to an unexpected filename.

Before I found that out I also used wildcards.

Excellent!!! Though i still recomend it if you have multiple files to work with!

I didn't say "don't use wildcards", I just meant that they shouldn't be used to avoid typing the full name of a single file, since Tab completion is much better in that case.

Wildcards (actually the proper name for it is "glob") are still very useful to get multiple files matching a pattern. And since I'm talking about globs, I thought I would mention this in case someone doesn't know:

"*" isn't the only glob character. "?" matches and single character, [abc] matches one of "a", "b", or "c", and [^abc] or [!abc] matches any one character that's not "a", "b", or "c".