BASIC LINUX COMMANDS

 Display information about the Operating

 System

hostnamectl

 

Display information about the CPU architecture

lscpu

 

Listing files and directories

 

ls

 

Detailed listing

 

ls -l

 

Lots of details about the contents of your directory

 

The * wildcard

 

ls d*

 

This will list all files in the current directory starting with d

 

Making Directories

 

mkdir tom

 

Changing to a different directory

 

cd tom

 

Change to the parent directory

 

cd .. 

will take you one directory up the hierarchy.

Command	Meaning
ls	List files and directories
ls -a	List all files and directories
mkdir	Make directory
cd directory	Change directory
cd	Change to the home directory
cd ~	Change to the home directory
cd ..	Change to the parent directory
pwd	Display the path of the current directory
man	Display manual
ping	Check internet connection
wget	Download files

 

Copying and Moving Files

Command	Meaning
cp file1 file2	Copy file1 and call it file2
mv file1 file2	Move or rename file1 to file2
rm file	Remove a file
rmdir directory	Remove a directory
rm -rf directory	Remove a directory and its files
cat file	Display a file or merge files
less file	Display a file a page at a time
head file	Display the first few lines of a file
tail file	Display the last few lines of a file
grep 'keyword' file	Search a file for keywords
wc file	Count number of lines/words/characters in file

Other useful Unix commands

 

Compress and extract files

This reduces the size of a file, thus freeing valuable disk space

tar -czvf archive.tar.gz directory name

 

Extract archive

 

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

 

Show command history

 

history

 

Open files using Text Editors

 

Popular text editors are vi, nano, gedit, leafpad etc.

Open file

     gedit filename

 

 E.g.

    gedit tom.txt

    leafpad tom.txt 

      nano tom.txt

 

How to install Microsoft fonts in Linux office suites

 

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

 

Update font cache

 

sudo fc-cache -fv

 

REFERENCES

 

UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

 http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/