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Module 2 Cheat Sheet - Introduction to Linux Commands

Return your user name:

whoami

Return your user and group id:

id

Return operating system name, username, and other info:

uname -a

Display reference manual for a command:

man top

List available man pages, including a brief description for each command:

man -k .

Get help on any command (for eg: curl):

curl --help

This provides a brief overview of the curl command's usage and options.

Return the current date and time:

date

Navigating and working with directories

List files and directories by date, newest to last:

ls -lrt

Find files in directory tree that end in .sh:

find -name "*.sh"

Return path to present working directory:

pwd

Make a new directory:

mkdir new_folder

Change the current directory:

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Up one level:

cd ../

To home:

cd ~` or `cd

To some other directory: cd path_to_directory

Remove directory verbosely:

rmdir temp_directory -v

Monitoring system performance and status

List selection of/all running processes and their PIDs:

ps

ps -e

Display resource usage:

top

List mounted file systems and usage:

df

Creating, copying, moving, and deleting files:

Create an empty file or update existing file's timestamp:

touch a_new_file.txt

Copy a file:

cp file.txt new_path/new_name.txt

Change file name or path:

mv this_file.txt that_path/that_file.txt

Remove a file verbosely:

rm this_old_file.txt -v

Working with file permissions

Change/modify file permissions to 'execute' for all users:

chmod +x my_script.sh

Change/modify file permissions to 'execute' only for you, the current user:

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chmod u+x my_file.txt

Remove 'read' permissions from group and other users:

chmod go-r

Displaying file and string contents

Display file contents:

cat my_shell_script.sh

Display file contents page-by-page:

more ReadMe.txt

Display first 10 lines of file:

head -10 data_table.csv

Display last 10 lines of file:

tail -10 data_table.csv

Display string or variable value:

echo "I am not a robot"

Basic text wrangling

Sorting lines and dropping duplicates:

Sort and display lines of file alphanumerically:

sort text_file.txt

In reverse order:

sort -r text_file.txt

Drop consecutive duplicated lines and display result:

uniq list_with_duplicated_lines.txt

Displaying basic stats:

Display the count of lines, words, or characters in a file:

Lines:
wc -l table_of_data.csv

Words:

wc -w my_essay.txt

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Characters:

wc -m some_document.txt

Extracting lines of text containing a pattern:

Some frequently used options for grep:

Option Description

-n Print line numbers along with matching lines

-c Get the count of matching lines

-i Ignore the case of the text while matching

-v Print all lines which do not contain the pattern

-w Match only if the pattern matches whole words

Extract lines containing the word "hello", case insensitive and whole words only:

grep -iw hello a_bunch_of_hellos.txt

Extract lines containing the pattern "hello" from all files in the current directory ending in .txt:

grep -l hello *.txt

Merge two or more files line-by-line, aligned as columns:

Suppose you have three files containing the first and last names of your customers, plus their phone numbers.

Use paste to align file contents into a Tab-delimited table, one row for each customer:

paste first_name.txt last_name.txt phone_number.txt

Use a comma as a delimiter instead of the default Tab delimiter:

paste -d "," first_name.txt last_name.txt phone_number.txt

Use the cut command to extract a column from a table-like file:

Suppose you have a text file whos rows consist of first and last names of customers, delimited by a comma.

Extract first names, line-by-line:

cut -d "," -f 1 names.csv

Extract the second to fifth characters (bytes) from each line of a file:

cut -b 2-5 my_text_file.txt

Extract the characters (bytes) from each line of a file, starting from the 10th byte to the end of the line:

cut -b 10- my_text_file.txt

Compression and archiving

Archive a set of files:

tar -cvf my_archive.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

Compress a set of files:

zip my_zipped_files.zip file1 file2

Extract files from a compressed zip archive:

unzip my_zipped_file.zip
unzip my_zipped_file.zip -d extract_to_this_direcory

Working with networking commands

Print hostname:

hostname

Send packets to URL and print response:

ping www.google.com

Display or configure system network interfaces:

ifconfig
ip

Display contents of file at a URL:

curl <url>

Download file from a URL:

wget <url>

Authors
Jeff Grossman
Sam Propupchuk

Other Contributors
Rav Ahuja

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