I'm working on further developing my Unix skills and I'm just curious what some of the experienced admins out there would consider to be 10 essential commands every admin should know.

Hmmm,

DTrace
Truss
STrace
tcpdump
iostat
vmstat
netstat
ps
ipfw
iptables

Ahh, that's 10.

Good luck

Carl

BOFH is correct, however, depending on your needs there may be a different set of "most essential commands" My example :
dig, traceroute, ping, whois, mail, ssh, ps, grep, perl, vi.

don't forget the basics like:
ls, cd, pwd, df, du, mount, man, format, more/less, cat

I considered the simpler commands but he did say "admin" commands. I provided my list based on admin type troubleshooting and problem determination. Everybody uses ls or cd, but only admins will use dtrace, truss, and ipfw (for example). ps is such a commonly used command, we forget that on many systems, ps doesn't return anything useful unless you're an admin.

Carl

I'd add "find" to the above lists.