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Most Important Linux Commands Cheatsheet

55 points by r0f1 5y ago

eternityforest 5y ago
This is the best list I've seen in this genre, because it excludes a lot of commands that you don't need and probably won't want to use in a modern mostly-GUI workflow, and even gives the appropriate scary warning for rm. If you need something like dd, or any of the "real programming" stuff like if statements and xargs, you probably really love it all and will find it yourself. If you just do a few things in shell and use Python and GUI for the rest, these Are the main ones. Slightly less common ones I'd add: kill and killall ps -aux | grep APPNAME (Technically not a single command, but it's 90% of my use of ps or grep, so it might as well be it's own command) cowsay, fortune, neofetch, and lolcat, sl Not actually included in shell but people should know about them anyway. It's said that Arch users are legally required to stare at the output of neofetch once per hour at minimum. Various systemctl commands: start, stop, status, enable, disable, mask systemd-analyze critical-chain nmtui (Not sure which distros include this by default and which don't) dmesg journalctl, dmesg sudo reboot now sudo shutdown now units (Usually not included, gotta install it) ping, ip a Also, this would be fantastic to include in educational material or even add directly to a distro. Does it have a license?
Maursault 5y ago
Thank goodness for Linux. Where would UNIX and BSD be without the most important Linux commands? I kid. No Linux commands listed, only shell commands. I'd like to initiate a cutesy repeatable Ghostbuster's themed meme: There is no Linux. There is only shell. Maybe if it is popular enough, the zealots will stop insisting GNU/Linux is the center of the cosmos, but I doubt it.
- errantmind 5y ago
  Everything you said is true but for absolute noobs who want to get started with Linux, this is useful
dmckeon 5y ago
The content is useful, and familiar to any experienced Unix/Linux user, but formatting that content as a table with many heavily folded lines nearly ruins the content for any really new user.
vimax 5y ago
As a start to using shell I recommend learning (roughly in order): man grep sed find piping and redirect xargs looping Knowing the basics of those unlocks a lot of the power of the shell. You can you them to brute force your way through most problems as you learn more.
- mud_dauber 5y ago
  Seconded - especially the section on xargs & looping.
xt00 5y ago
I would tweak the redirect info to have “xxx &> file” in there since that’s one that is often confusing to people early on that want to output stdout and stderr to a file and are confused about how to do that. But yea the list of stuff here is a nice starter list for sure.
- r0f1 5y ago
  Thanks, good idea. I will add that one.
nunez 5y ago
OMG thank you for putting this together, OP. I work with clients for whom this knowledge will be greatly useful. CTRL-R is a revelation, every time.
nhutton 5y ago
I know that people like to use ctrl-R to search backwards through history, but I am very zealous about using the up-arrow to search through your history instead (in your .bashrc): bindkey "^[[a" history-beginning-search-backward bindkey "^[[B" history-beginning-search-forward
thiagocsf 5y ago
Pedantic note about ctrl+d: it doesn’t mean logout. It sends and EOF character. Said EOF is honoured by your TTY, which closes the FD this ending the session. You can see this by typing `cat -` and ending it with ctrl+d. The windows equivalent is ctrl+z.
- gnubison 5y ago
  Pedantic-er note: ^D isn’t necessarily the VEOF character — you can change it with tcsetattr() after modifying termiosp->c_cc[VINTR] or by using stty(1). And it doesn’t send an “EOF character” (EOF is a condition/convention more than a character). All it does is make read(2) return immediately with whatever data is currently in the line buffer. You can try it now: $ cat something^Dsomething^D $ cat VEOF causes the tty driver (tty(4)) to send “something” to cat immediately; and cat echoes that back out to the terminal as intended. If there’s nothing in the line-buffer (because you pressed VEOF at the start of the line) then read(2) returns 0, which is interpreted as an end-of-file condition by your libc in fread() and friends. You can checkout OpenBSD’s termios(4) for a more detailed explanation :)

55 points by r0f1 5y ago

This is the best list I've seen in this genre, because it excludes a lot of commands that you don't need and probably won't want to use in a modern mostly-GUI workflow, and even gives the appropriate scary warning for rm. If you need something like dd, or any of the "real programming" stuff like if statements and xargs, you probably really love it all and will find it yourself. If you just do a few things in shell and use Python and GUI for the rest, these Are the main ones. Slightly less common ones I'd add: kill and killall ps -aux | grep APPNAME (Technically not a single command, but it's 90% of my use of ps or grep, so it might as well be it's own command) cowsay, fortune, neofetch, and lolcat, sl Not actually included in shell but people should know about them anyway. It's said that Arch users are legally required to stare at the output of neofetch once per hour at minimum. Various systemctl commands: start, stop, status, enable, disable, mask systemd-analyze critical-chain nmtui (Not sure which distros include this by default and which don't) dmesg journalctl, dmesg sudo reboot now sudo shutdown now units (Usually not included, gotta install it) ping, ip a Also, this would be fantastic to include in educational material or even add directly to a distro. Does it have a license?

Maursault 5y ago

Thank goodness for Linux. Where would UNIX and BSD be without the most important Linux commands? I kid. No Linux commands listed, only shell commands. I'd like to initiate a cutesy repeatable Ghostbuster's themed meme: There is no Linux. There is only shell. Maybe if it is popular enough, the zealots will stop insisting GNU/Linux is the center of the cosmos, but I doubt it.

errantmind 5y ago
Everything you said is true but for absolute noobs who want to get started with Linux, this is useful

dmckeon 5y ago

The content is useful, and familiar to any experienced Unix/Linux user, but formatting that content as a table with many heavily folded lines nearly ruins the content for any really new user.

vimax 5y ago

As a start to using shell I recommend learning (roughly in order): man grep sed find piping and redirect xargs looping Knowing the basics of those unlocks a lot of the power of the shell. You can you them to brute force your way through most problems as you learn more.

mud_dauber 5y ago
Seconded - especially the section on xargs & looping.

xt00 5y ago

I would tweak the redirect info to have “xxx &> file” in there since that’s one that is often confusing to people early on that want to output stdout and stderr to a file and are confused about how to do that. But yea the list of stuff here is a nice starter list for sure.

r0f1 5y ago
Thanks, good idea. I will add that one.

nunez 5y ago

OMG thank you for putting this together, OP. I work with clients for whom this knowledge will be greatly useful. CTRL-R is a revelation, every time.

nhutton 5y ago

I know that people like to use ctrl-R to search backwards through history, but I am very zealous about using the up-arrow to search through your history instead (in your .bashrc): bindkey "^[[a" history-beginning-search-backward bindkey "^[[B" history-beginning-search-forward

thiagocsf 5y ago

Pedantic note about ctrl+d: it doesn’t mean logout. It sends and EOF character. Said EOF is honoured by your TTY, which closes the FD this ending the session. You can see this by typing `cat -` and ending it with ctrl+d. The windows equivalent is ctrl+z.

gnubison 5y ago
Pedantic-er note: ^D isn’t necessarily the VEOF character — you can change it with tcsetattr() after modifying termiosp->c_cc[VINTR] or by using stty(1). And it doesn’t send an “EOF character” (EOF is a condition/convention more than a character). All it does is make read(2) return immediately with whatever data is currently in the line buffer. You can try it now: $ cat something^Dsomething^D $ cat VEOF causes the tty driver (tty(4)) to send “something” to cat immediately; and cat echoes that back out to the terminal as intended. If there’s nothing in the line-buffer (because you pressed VEOF at the start of the line) then read(2) returns 0, which is interpreted as an end-of-file condition by your libc in fread() and friends. You can checkout OpenBSD’s termios(4) for a more detailed explanation :)