Basic & useful Linux commands

Shuts down the operating system

halt

Shuts down & restarts the operating system

reboot

Clear the terminal

clear

Open the manual page

This command opens the manual page for the command or utility specified.

man ls

Find files or directory

find / -name grub.conf

But this search took several minutes to complete because we have to search all directories and sub directories. So we can specify the directory.

find /etc -name grub.conf

Read the files

cat grub.conf

Read few lines of file

head /etc/passwd

In default, The head command display top 10 lines of a file. But we can specify the number of lines.

head -n15 /etc/passwd

To display the last bottom lines of file, we have to use tail command.

tail /etc/passwd

Same like head command, we can specify the number of lines.

tail -n15 /etc/passwd

Copy content of a file

cp file1.txt file2.txt

The cp command take the contents of one file and place a copy with the same or different name in the directory of our choice.

Rename file

mv file1 file2

Search term through a file

grep 'vickey' /etc/passwd

Count the word

wc file1.txt

The command output will be in number of lines, number of words and number of character format. If we only need any one of them , use option -l for line numbers, -w for words and -c for characters.

wc -l file1.txt

Search and replace words

sed 's/Windows/Linux/' data.txt > newdata.txt

The above command find the first instance of Windows in each line from data.txt file and replace that text with Linux and save the whole content to newdata.txt file.

Find the users who currently logged in

who

Displays the environment variables

env

Get the user name of the currently logged-in user

whoami

Display Calender

cal

The cal command will display current month calendar. But we can also specify the year.

cal 2010

Get system date & time

date

Use calculator

bc

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This article was published on October 3, 2016

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