There aren't alot of benifits unless you pay a fee.. Most require it now but there used to be FREE unrestricted shells that host would provide.. But too many problems occured and now it's hard to find a free shell provider with no restrictions. I would reccomend going to google and searching for information on shells and unix. Here's a site with some basic UNIX commands. Here's also a good place to start.

Hope this helps,

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