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Basic Unix Commands

Knowing basic Unix commands should allow you to navigate your Unix or Linux system, con rm
current system status and manage les or directories.

UPDATE 01/2019: I'll be publishing a short video walkthrough of Basic Unix Commands here at
the top of the page shortly.

Getting help in Unix

man – view manual pages for Unix commands

Unix Shell Commands

clear – clear screen
history – show history of previous commands

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 Time and Date commands
date – show current date and time
sleep – wait for a given number of seconds
uptime – nd out how long the system has been up

Unix users commands

These commands allow you to get basic information about Unix users in your environment.

whoami – show your username

id – print user identity
groups – show which groups user belongs to
passwd – change user password
who – nd out who is logged into the system
last – show history of logins into the system

Unix le operations
Navigating lesystem and managing les and access permissions:

ls – list les and directories

cp – copy les (work in progress)
rm – remove les and directories (work in progress)
mv – rename or move les and directories to another location
chmod – change le/directory access permissions

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 chown – change le/directory ownership

Text le operations in Unix

Most of important con guration in Unix is in clear text les, these commands will let you quickly
inspect les or view logs:

cat – concatenate les and show contents to the standard output

more – basic pagination when viewing text les or parsing Unix commands output
less – an improved pagination tool for viewing text les (better than more command)
head – show the rst 10 lines of text le (you can specify any number of lines)
tail – show the last 10 lines of text le (any number can be speci ed)

Unix directory management commands

Navigating lesystems and managing directories:

cd – change directory
pwd – con rm current directory
ln – make links and symlinks to les and directories
mkdir – make new directory
rmdir – remove directories in Unix

Unix system status commands

Most useful commands for reviewing hostname con guration and vital stats:

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 hostname – show or set server hostname
w – display system load, who's logged in and what they are doing
uname – print Unix system information

Networking commands in Unix

Most useful commands for inspecting network setup and exploring network connections and
ports:

ifcon g – show and set IP addresses (found almost everywhere)

ip – show and set IP addresses (in recent Linux versions)
ping – check if remote host is reachable via ICMP ping
netstat – show network stats and routing information

Process management
Listing processes and con rming their status, and stopping processes if needed:

ps – list processes
top – show tasks and system status
kill – kill a process (stop application running)

Remote access commands

ssh is really the only way to go, but it's important to know telnet as well:

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 telnet – clear-text (insecure) remote access protocol
ssh – Secure SHell – encrypted remote access client
check out the SSH reference!

File transfers  commands

Always useful to know how to copy les between servers or just download some package from the
web:

ftp – clear-text (insecure!) File Transfer Protocol client

sftp – secure (encrypted) version of FTP
scp – secure (encrypted) version of cp command
wget – download les from remote servers, HTTP/HTTPS and FTP

See also
Basic Linux Commands
Unix Commands
Linux Commands
macOS commands
Advanced Unix commands

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Basic Unix Commands

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 ls command

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