I recently began to really take advantage of using the command line to manage my websites. I’m actually quite surprised as how much easier some tasks are to perform through a command line rather than through a GUI. The SSH client I’ve been using is Putty and it’s very simple, fast, and powerful.
A great example of how some tasks are easier via the command line is the ability to be able to specify a wild-card or Regex command on functions like copy, delete, move, etc.. I wanted to move all my PDF files into their own folder instead of being mixed in with all my html/php files. I could have used my FTP client and manually selected all 34 files and then copy them over but it was much easier to just type mv *.pdf /downloads/pdf/
