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Most Important Linux commands you should know→ Our guide to Linux commands describes an essential kernel and shell commands and gives links to useful Linux administrator resources.
Linux administrators can’t live by the GUI alone. That’s why we have compiled an important Linux commands into this helpful guide. We have designed this guide specifically for Linux managers and system administrators as a reference library of only probably the most important utilities.
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This article offers practical examples for some most frequently used commands in Linux / UNIX.
This isn’t a complete list by any means; however, this could provide you with a jumpstart on a few of the common Linux commands. Bookmark this article for your future reference.
Beginner Commands
cd – Changes the current working of a directory in command line console.
exit – Exits out of the current program, terminates current command line terminal or a logs you out of the Unix network depending on the context.
kill – Terminates the desired running the process. The Linux version of the Windows’ “End Process” in task manager.
ls – List all the contents of a specified directory. If no directory is specified, it should use the current directory.
man – The re’s a running gag in the Linux community that man is the only command you have to know. It stands for manual, and it gives you detailed information on the commands and aspects of Linux.
pwd – Displays any current working directory for the command line terminal. Good for while you’ve lost track of where you’re in your system.
reboot – Instantly stops all running processes, shuts down the system, then reboots.
shutdown – Stops all running processes and shuts down the system. Parameters could be specified to the problem a delayed shutdown or a shutdown at a specific time.
sudo – Runs the commands as root, that means no limitations because of permissions.
System Information
date – Prints out current system date and time. Specified the parameters that can change the format of the output.
df – Reports disk space usage for a file system.
hostname – Displays the name of the current host system.
ps – Displays details about the entire processes running on the system.
quota – Displays disk limits and the current disk usage for a specified user. Useful for multiple users assigned to a particular system.
top – Shows the entire high processes in the system, by default sorted by CPU utilization.
uptime – Reports how long system has been running since the last boot. Extremely useful for the servers.
File Manipulation
bzip2 – Compresses the specified contents into a .bz2 archive or extracts from a .bz2 archive depending on a parameter.
chmod / chown – Changes access permissions of 1 or more files (chmod) or change the ownership of a specific file to the new user (chown). Only users with the permission or ownership of a file can change that file’s permissions or the ownership.
cp – Copies files to the new location with new name depending on parameters. Also Can copy directories too, whether recursively (includes all subdirectories) or maybe not.
find / locate – Useful for Searches the system starting at a particular directory and matching all files inside that location to the set of conditions laid out by command parameters. Very helpful for quickly finding certain files.
grep – Searches via the entire files in a specified location trying to find files that contain lines that match a given string. Returns the list of all of files that scored the match.
install – Used in the conjunction with Makefiles to copy files from one location to system. Don’t confused with installing packages from the software repository.mkdir / rmdir – The command is use to Creates the directory (mkdir) or deletes the specified directory (rmdir). The Directories can only be created and deleted within the directories that you’ve got permission in.
mv – Moves files and directories to a different location. Can be utilized to rename a files and the directories by keep their source and the destination locations same.
open – Opens the specified file using default system application for a files of its type.
rm – Remove and remove directory. This command is Used for delete files and the directories from system, whether one file/directory at a time or in batch.
tar – Creates the .tar archive or extracts from a .tar archive depending on a specified parameters.
zip / unzip – It can Creates a .zip archive or extracts from a .zip archive depending on specified parameters.
Other Noteworthy Commands
apt-get – This is Advanced Packaging Tool. This command is useful to install, remove, and configure software packages in your system. For a menu-based version, use the aptitude command. Available on the Debian-based Linux distributions.
ftp / sftp – Connects to the remote FTP server for download multiple files.
wget – The command useful for downloads files from the Internet on the specified URL to your Linux system.
yum – Yellowdog Updater, Modified. An open source package manager used to simply install software packages from repositories. Obtainable on RPM-compatible Linux distributions.
emacs – Probably the most well-known text editors on the Unix-like systems.
nano – A newbie-friendly command-line text editor that uses keyboard shortcuts to simulate menus.
vim – Vim is the successor to Vi, each of that command line text editors for Unix-like methods. Although Vim is famous, it doesn’t use menus or icons for its interface, so it has a status of being newbie-friendly.
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