So you’ve installed a flavor of Linux such as Ubuntu or you have shell access to a Linux system and you want to start doing some damage. The admins at LXPages.com compiled 10 commands that every Newbie Linux user should definitely know to start being effective.
Here is the list along with truncated descriptions. Be sure to head over to LXPages to see complete descriptions.
- ls - This basic command is your eyeball into the filesystem. Use it to list the contents of a directory…
- find - The find command will search where you want it to search and find directories or files that match conditions such as name, date last accessed, file size and more…
- man - Man stands for manual, so “man page” really means it’s manual page. Most linux commands have manual pages that describe how the command is utilized. So you can usually type man to view it’s manual page…
- vi - The editor of choice for serious linux users [sorry Emacs fans ;-)]. Use the “man vi” command to read details on this prince of editors. …
- cat - How do you view the contents of a file? You can let the “cat” of the bag with the cat command! HA! Here’s how you can use the command…
- more - What if there the file you cat fills more than 1 screen? You can pipe the cat command into more which will allow you to view the contents one screenfull at a time…
- grep - If you need to search for certain phrases or words in a file? And for this we can use the grep command. Say we want to search for all the occurances of the word “passwd” in a filename…
- chmod - You have a script that you need to run, and oh no it won’t run? By utilizing the “ls -la” command you learned you can see if the script has execute permissions. If it doesn’t you may give it execute permission by running: chmod +x scriptfile…
- ps - What are you running in the background? How can you tell? By using the “ps” command of course you can view which processes are running under your account…
- cp, mv, rm - How do you copy, move or remove a file? There’s actually three different commands for each of these functions…