FreeBSD and other Unix systems use man pages for system documentation, they are called by the man command. For FreeBSD the following are useful man pages: man firewall will give advice for building a FreeBSD firewall man hier will explain the way FreeBSD filesystems are normally laid out. Man pages are divided into section depending on topic. There are 9 different sections numbered from 1 (General Commands) to 9 (Kernel Developer’s Manual). You can get an introduction to each topic by typing man <number> intro In other words, to get the intro to general commands, type man 1 intro man ports gives many useful hints about installing FreeBSD ports. man security gives very good advice on how to tune the security of your FreeBSD system. man tuning gives some tips how to tune performance of your FreeBSD system.

If you accidentally end up inside vi, you can quit it by pressing Escape, colon (:), q (q), bang (!) and pressing return.

You can adjust your bash prompt to virtually anything you like. Handy bash(1) prompt: PS1="\u@\h \w \!$" You can find more here: Bash Prompts

Forget what directory you are in? Type pwd.

Ever wonder what those numbers after command names were, as in cat(1)? It’s the section of the manual the man page is in. man man will tell you more.

Any user that is a member of the wheel group can use su - to simulate a root login. You can add a user to the wheel group by editing /etc/group.

You can use aliases to decrease the amount of typing you need to do to get commands you commonly use. Examples of fairly popular aliases include (in Bourne shell style, as in /bin/sh, bash, ksh, and zsh): alias lf=”ls -FA” alias ll=”ls -lA” alias su=”su -m” In csh or tcsh, these would be alias lf ls -FA alias ll ls -lA alias su su -m To remove an alias, you can usually use ‘unalias aliasname’. To list all aliases, you can usually type just alias. Read more