If you like, however, you can run it from a button or a menu or whathaveyou. One time I found an 80MB log file that procmail was creating in a tucked away little directory, writing verbose log info about every piece of mail I get every hour. When you get a moment, take a look at it with a pager like less or more. These are the essence of how you make your shell into a home. Variables are substitutions your shell will automatically make for your convenience.
Aliases are lots of fun too.
Your hands will hurt less and you can hold more doughnuts and Doritos. Functions are like little scripts that you build right into your shell environment. Sometimes you fill up a filesystem and want to move an entire directory tree to another filesystem to make more room. I have to jump into things quickly because I don't have space to explain very much in this little column. There are lots of little doodads like this in Unix, and perhaps I can talk a little bit about some of them.