Command |
Description |
• |
apropos
whatis |
Show commands
pertinent to string. See also threadsafe |
• |
man -t
ascii | ps2pdf - > ascii.pdf |
make
a pdf of a manual page |
|
which
command |
Show
full path name of command |
|
time
command |
See
how long a command takes |
• |
time
cat |
Start
stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See also sw |
dir
navigation |
• |
cd
- |
Go
to previous directory |
• |
cd |
Go
to $HOME directory |
|
(cd
dir && command) |
Go
to dir, execute command and return to current dir |
• |
pushd . |
Put
current dir on stack so you can popd back to it |
file
searching |
• |
alias l='ls
-l --color=auto' |
quick
dir listing |
• |
ls
-lrt |
List
files by date. See also newest and find_mm_yyyy |
• |
ls
/usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS |
Print
in 9 columns to width of terminal |
|
find
-name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr' |
Search 'expr'
in this dir and below. See also findrepo |
|
find
-type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example' |
Search
all regular files for 'example' in this dir and below |
|
find
-maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example' |
Search
all regular files for 'example' in this dir |
|
find -maxdepth
1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done |
Process
each item with multiple commands (in while loop) |
• |
find
-type f ! -perm -444 |
Find
files not readable by all (useful for web site) |
• |
find
-type d ! -perm -111 |
Find
dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site) |
• |
locate
-r 'file[^/]*\.txt' |
Search
cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt |
• |
look
reference |
Quickly
search (sorted) dictionary for prefix |
• |
grep --color reference
/usr/share/dict/words |
Highlight
occurances of regular expression in dictionary |
archives
and compression |
|
gpg
-c file |
Encrypt
file |
|
gpg
file.gpg |
Decrypt
file |
|
tar
-c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 |
Make
compressed archive of dir/ |
|
bzip2
-dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x |
Extract
archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files) |
|
tar
-c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' |
Make
encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine |
|
find
dir/ -name '*.txt' | tar -c --files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 |
Make
archive of subset of dir/ and below |
|
find
dir/ -name '*.txt' | xargs cp -a --target-directory=dir_txt/ --parents |
Make
copy of subset of dir/ and below |
|
(
tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) |
Copy
(with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir |
|
(
cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) |
Copy
(with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/ |
|
(
tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd /where/to/ && tar -x
-p' |
Copy
(with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir |
|
dd
bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz' |
Backup
harddisk to remote machine |
rsync (Network efficient file copier: Use the --dry-run option
for testing) |
|
rsync
-P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file |
Only
get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads |
|
rsync
--bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile |
Locally
copy with rate limit. It's like nice for I/O |
|
rsync
-az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:'~/public_html' |
Mirror
web site (using compression and encryption) |
|
rsync
-auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . &&
rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ |
Synchronize
current directory with remote one |
ssh (Secure SHell) |
|
ssh
$USER@$HOST command |
Run
command on $HOST as $USER (default command=shell) |
• |
ssh
-f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes |
Run
GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER |
|
scp
-p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/ |
Copy
with permissions to $USER's home directory on $HOST |
|
scp
-c arcfour $USER@$LANHOST: bigfile |
Use
faster crypto for local LAN. This might saturate GigE |
|
ssh
-g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST |
Forward
connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to $HOST:80 |
|
ssh
-R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST |
Forward
connections from $HOST:1434 in to imap:143 |
|
ssh-copy-id
$USER@$HOST |
Install
public key for $USER@$HOST for password-less log in |
wget (multi purpose download tool) |
• |
(cd
dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) |
Store
local browsable version of a page to the current dir |
|
wget
-c http://www.example.com/large.file |
Continue
downloading a partially downloaded file |
|
wget
-r -nd -np -l1 -A '*.jpg' http://www.example.com/dir/ |
Download
a set of files to the current directory |
|
wget
ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ |
FTP
supports globbing directly |
• |
wget
-q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep 'a href' | head |
Process
output directly |
|
echo
'wget url' | at 01:00 |
Download
url at 1AM to current dir |
|
wget
--limit-rate=20k url |
Do a low
priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case) |
|
wget
-nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html |
Check
links in a file |
|
wget
--mirror http://www.example.com/ |
Efficiently
update a local copy of a site (handy from cron) |
networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are
obsolete) |
|
ethtool eth0 |
Show
status of ethernet interface eth0 |
|
ethtool
--change eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full |
Manually
set ethernet interface speed |
|
iwconfig eth1 |
Show
status of wireless interface eth1 |
|
iwconfig
eth1 rate 1Mb/s fixed |
Manually
set wireless interface speed |
• |
iwlist scan |
List
wireless networks in range |
• |
ip link
show |
List
network interfaces |
|
ip
link set dev eth0 name wan |
Rename
interface eth0 to wan |
|
ip
link set dev eth0 up |
Bring
interface eth0 up (or down) |
• |
ip
addr show |
List
addresses for interfaces |
|
ip
addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 |
Add
(or del) ip and mask (255.255.255.0) |
• |
ip
route show |
List
routing table |
|
ip
route add default via 1.2.3.254 |
Set
default gateway to 1.2.3.254 |
• |
host
pixelbeat.org |
Lookup
DNS ip address for name or vice versa |
• |
hostname
-i |
Lookup
local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`) |
• |
whois
pixelbeat.org |
Lookup
whois info for hostname or ip address |
• |
netstat
-tupl |
List
internet services on a system |
• |
netstat
-tup |
List
active connections to/from system |
windows
networking (Note samba is the package that provides
all this windows specific networking support) |
• |
smbtree |
Find
windows machines. See also findsmb |
|
nmblookup
-A 1.2.3.4 |
Find
the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address |
|
smbclient
-L windows_box |
List
shares on windows machine or samba server |
|
mount
-t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share |
Mount
a windows share |
|
echo
'message' | smbclient -M windows_box |
Send
popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2) |
text
manipulation (Note sed uses stdin and stdout. Newer
versions support inplace editing with the -i option) |
|
sed
's/string1/string2/g' |
Replace
string1 with string2 |
|
sed
's/\(.*\)1/\12/g' |
Modify
anystring1 to anystring2 |
|
sed
'/ *#/d; /^ *$/d' |
Remove
comments and blank lines |
|
sed
':a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta' |
Concatenate
lines with trailing \ |
|
sed
's/[ \t]*$//' |
Remove
trailing spaces from lines |
|
sed
's/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g' |
Escape
shell metacharacters active within double quotes |
• |
seq
10 | sed "s/^/ /; s/
*\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" |
Right
align numbers |
|
sed
-n '1000{p;q}' |
Print
1000th line |
|
sed
-n '10,20p;20q' |
Print
lines 10 to 20 |
|
sed
-n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title>.*/\1/ip;T;q' |
Extract
title from HTML web page |
|
sed
-i 42d ~/.ssh/known_hosts |
Delete
a particular line |
|
sort
-t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n |
Sort
IPV4 ip addresses |
• |
echo
'Test' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' |
Case
conversion |
• |
tr
-dc '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom |
Filter
non printable characters |
• |
tr
-s '[:blank:]' '\t' </proc/diskstats | cut -f4 |
cut
fields separated by blanks |
• |
history
| wc -l |
Count
lines |
set operations (Note you can export
LANG=C for speed. Also these assume no duplicate lines within a file) |
|
sort
file1 file2 | uniq |
Union of
unsorted files |
|
sort
file1 file2 | uniq -d |
Intersection of
unsorted files |
|
sort
file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u |
Difference of
unsorted files |
|
sort
file1 file2 | uniq -u |
Symmetric
Difference of unsorted files |
|
join -t'\0' -a1
-a2 file1 file2 |
Union
of sorted files |
|
join
-t'\0' file1 file2 |
Intersection
of sorted files |
|
join
-t'\0' -v2 file1 file2 |
Difference
of sorted files |
|
join
-t'\0' -v1 -v2 file1 file2 |
Symmetric
Difference of sorted files |
math |
• |
echo
'(1 + sqrt(5))/2' | bc -l |
Quick math
(Calculate φ). See also bc |
• |
seq
-f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l |
Calculate π the unix way |
• |
echo
'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)' | bc |
More
complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate |
• |
echo
'pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)' | python |
Python
handles scientific notation |
• |
echo
'pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)' | gnuplot -persist |
Plot
FastE packet rate vs packet size |
• |
echo
'obase=16; ibase=10; 64206' | bc |
Base
conversion (decimal to hexadecimal) |
• |
echo
$((0x2dec)) |
Base
conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion)) |
• |
units -t
'100m/9.58s' 'miles/hour' |
Unit
conversion (metric to imperial) |
• |
units
-t '500GB' 'GiB' |
Unit
conversion (SI to IEC prefixes) |
• |
units
-t '1 googol' |
Definition
lookup |
• |
seq
100 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc |
Add
a column of numbers. See also add and funcpy |
calendar |
• |
cal
-3 |
Display
a calendar |
• |
cal
9 1752 |
Display
a calendar for a particular month year |
• |
date
-d fri |
What date is
it this friday. See also day |
• |
[
$(date -d '12:00 +1 day' +%d) = '01' ] || exit |
exit
a script unless it's the last day of the month |
• |
date
--date='25 Dec' +%A |
What
day does xmas fall on, this year |
• |
date
--date='@2147483647' |
Convert
seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to date |
• |
TZ='America/Los_Angeles'
date |
What
time is it on west coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ) |
• |
date
--date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri' |
What's
the local time for 9AM next Friday on west coast US |
locales |
• |
printf
"%'d\n" 1234 |
Print
number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale |
• |
BLOCK_SIZE=\'1
ls -l |
Use locale
thousands grouping in ls. See also l |
• |
echo
"I live in `locale territory`" |
Extract
info from locale database |
• |
LANG=en_IE.utf8
locale int_prefix |
Lookup locale
info for specific country. See also ccodes |
• |
locale
-kc $(locale | sed -n 's/\(LC_.\{4,\}\)=.*/\1/p') | less |
List
fields available in locale database |
recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos) |
• |
recode
-l | less |
Show
available conversions (aliases on each line) |
|
recode
windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt |
Windows
"ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion) |
|
recode
utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt |
Windows
utf8 to local charset |
|
recode
iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt |
Latin9
(western europe) to utf8 |
|
recode
../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 |
Base64
encode |
|
recode
/qp.. < file.qp > file.txt |
Quoted
printable decode |
|
recode
..HTML < file.txt > file.html |
Text
to HTML |
• |
recode
-lf windows-1252 | grep euro |
Lookup table
of characters |
• |
echo
-n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump |
Show
what a code represents in latin-9 charmap |
• |
echo
-n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x |
Show
latin-9 encoding |
• |
echo
-n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x |
Show
utf-8 encoding |
CDs |
|
gzip
< /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz |
Save
copy of data cdrom |
|
mkisofs
-V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz |
Create
cdrom image from contents of dir |
|
mount
-o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir |
Mount
the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only) |
|
cdrecord
-v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast |
Clear
a CDRW |
|
gzip
-dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - |
Burn
cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev) |
|
cdparanoia
-B |
Rip
audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir |
|
cdrecord
-v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad *.wav |
Make
audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao) |
|
oggenc
--tracknum='track' track.cdda.wav -o 'track.ogg' |
Make
ogg file from wav file |
disk space (See also FSlint) |
• |
ls
-lSr |
Show
files by size, biggest last |
• |
du
-s * | sort -k1,1rn | head |
Show top disk
users in current dir. See also dutop |
• |
du
-hs /home/* | sort -k1,1h |
Sort
paths by easy to interpret disk usage |
• |
df
-h |
Show
free space on mounted filesystems |
• |
df
-i |
Show
free inodes on mounted filesystems |
• |
fdisk -l |
Show
disks partitions sizes and types (run as root) |
• |
rpm -q -a
--qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n |
List
all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros |
• |
dpkg-query -W
-f='${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n |
List
all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros |
• |
dd
bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test |
Create a large
test file (taking no space). See also truncate |
• |
>
file |
truncate
data of file or create an empty file |
monitoring/debugging |
• |
tail
-f /var/log/messages |
Monitor messages in a log file |
• |
strace
-c ls >/dev/null |
Summarise/profile
system calls made by command |
• |
strace
-f -e open ls >/dev/null |
List
system calls made by command |
• |
strace
-f -e trace=write -e write=1,2 ls >/dev/null |
Monitor
what's written to stdout and stderr |
• |
ltrace
-f -e getenv ls >/dev/null |
List
library calls made by command |
• |
lsof -p $$ |
List
paths that process id has open |
• |
lsof
~ |
List
processes that have specified path open |
• |
tcpdump
not port 22 |
Show network traffic except ssh. See
also tcpdump_not_me |
• |
ps
-e -o pid,args --forest |
List
processes in a hierarchy |
• |
ps
-e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d' |
List
processes by % cpu usage |
• |
ps
-e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS |
List processes by mem (KB) usage. See
also ps_mem.py |
• |
ps
-C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state |
List
all threads for a particular process |
• |
ps
-p 1,$$ -o etime= |
List
elapsed wall time for particular process IDs |
• |
last
reboot |
Show
system reboot history |
• |
free
-m |
Show
amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB) |
• |
watch
-n.1 'cat /proc/interrupts' |
Watch
changeable data continuously |
• |
udevadm
monitor |
Monitor
udev events to help configure rules |
system information (see also sysinfo)
('#' means root access is required) |
• |
uname
-a |
Show
kernel version and system architecture |
• |
head
-n1 /etc/issue |
Show
name and version of distribution |
• |
cat
/proc/partitions |
Show
all partitions registered on the system |
• |
grep
MemTotal /proc/meminfo |
Show
RAM total seen by the system |
• |
grep
"model name" /proc/cpuinfo |
Show
CPU(s) info |
• |
lspci -tv |
Show
PCI info |
• |
lsusb -tv |
Show
USB info |
• |
mount
| column -t |
List
mounted filesystems on the system (and align output) |
• |
grep
-F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info |
Show
state of cells in laptop battery |
# |
dmidecode
-q | less |
Display
SMBIOS/DMI information |
# |
smartctl
-A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours |
How
long has this disk (system) been powered on in total |
# |
hdparm
-i /dev/sda |
Show
info about disk sda |
# |
hdparm
-tT /dev/sda |
Do
a read speed test on disk sda |
# |
badblocks
-s /dev/sda |
Test
for unreadable blocks on disk sda |
interactive (see also linux keyboard
shortcuts) |
• |
readline |
Line
editor used by bash, python, bc, gnuplot, ... |
• |
screen |
Virtual
terminals with detach capability, ... |
• |
mc |
Powerful
file manager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, ... |
• |
gnuplot |
Interactive/scriptable
graphing |
• |
links |
Web
browser |
• |
xdg-open . |
open
a file or url with the registered desktop application |