Command Description

Show commands pertinent to string. See also

• apropos whatis
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 $HOME directory
Go to dir, execute command and return to
  (cd dir && command)
current dir
Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to
• pushd .
it
file searching
• alias l='ls -l --color=auto' quick dir listing. See also l
List files by date. See also newest and
• ls -lrt
find_mm_yyyy
• ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS Print in 9 columns to width of terminal
Search 'expr' in this dir and below. See also
  find -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr'
findrepo
Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir
  find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example'
and below
  find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example' Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir
Process each item with multiple commands (in
  find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done
while loop)
• find -type f ! -perm -444 Find files not readable by all (useful for web site)
Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web
• find -type d ! -perm -111
site)
Search cached index for names. This re is like
• locate -r 'file[^/]*\.txt'
glob *file*.txt
• look reference Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for prefix
Highlight occurances of regular expression in
• grep --color reference /usr/share/dict/words
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/
Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for
  bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x
tar.gz files)
Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote
  tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg'
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
Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/
  ( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p )
dir
Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to
  ( cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p )
/where/to/
Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to
  ( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p'
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)
Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome
  rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file
downloads
  rsync --bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile Locally copy with rate limit. It's like nice for I/O
Mirror web site (using compression and
  rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:'~/public_html'
encryption)
  rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ Synchronize current directory with remote one
ssh (Secure SHell)
Run command on $HOST as $USER (default
  ssh $USER@$HOST command
command=shell)
• ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes Run GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER
Copy with permissions to $USER's home
  scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/
directory on $HOST
Use faster crypto for local LAN. This might
  scp -c arcfour $USER@$LANHOST: bigfile
saturate GigE
Forward connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to
  ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST
$HOST:80
Forward connections from $HOST:1434 in to
  ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST
imap:143
  ssh-copy-id $USER@$HOST Install public key for $USER@$HOST for
password-less log in
wget (multi purpose download tool)
Store local browsable version of a page to the
• (cd dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html)
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
Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in
  wget --limit-rate=20k url
this case)
  wget -nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file
Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy
  wget --mirror http://www.example.com/
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
  iw dev wlan0 link Show link status of wireless interface wlan0
  iw dev wlan0 set bitrates legacy-2.4 1 Manually set wireless interface speed
• iw dev wlan0 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
• ss -tupl List internet services on a system
• ss -tup List active connections to/from system
• host pixelbeat.org Lookup DNS ip address for name or vice versa
Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host
• hostname -i
`hostname`)
• whois pixelbeat.org Lookup whois info for hostname or ip address
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
Send popup to windows machine (off by default
  echo 'message' | smbclient -M windows_box
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
Escape shell metacharacters active within double
  sed 's/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g'
quotes
• seq 10 | sed "s/^/      /; s/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" Right align numbers
• seq 10 | sed p | paste - - Duplicate a column
  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
Concatenate and separate line items to a single
• seq 10 | paste -s -d ' '
line
set operations (Note you can export LANG=C for speed. Also these assume no duplicate lines within a file)
  sort -u file1 file2 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
More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE
• echo 'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)' | bc
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)
Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic
• echo $((0x2dec))
expansion))
• units -t '100m/9.58s' 'miles/hour' Unit conversion (metric to imperial)
Unit conversion (SI to IEC prefixes). See also
• units -t '500GB' 'GiB'
numfmt
• units -t '1 googol' Definition lookup
Add a column of numbers. See also add and
• seq 100 | paste -s -d+ | bc
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 today +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
Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01
• date --date='@2147483647'
UTC) to date
What time is it on west coast of US (use tzselect
• TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date
to find TZ)
What's the local time for 9AM next Friday on west
• date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri'
coast US
locales
Print number with thousands grouping
• printf "%'d\n" 1234
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
Lookup locale info for specific country. See also
• LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix
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)
Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF
  recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt
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)
  wodim dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW
  gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | wodim -tao dev=/dev/cdrom -v -data - Burn cdrom image (use --prcap to confirm dev)
Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current
  cdparanoia -B
dir
Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see
  wodim -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad *.wav
also cdrdao)
  oggenc --tracknum=$track track.cdda.wav -o track.ogg Make ogg file from wav file
disk space (See also FSlint)
• ls -lSr Show files by size, biggest last
• du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop
• du -hs /home/* | sort -k1,1h Sort paths by easy to interpret disk usage
• df -h Show free space on mounted filesystems
• df -i Show free inodes on mounted filesystems
Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as
• fdisk -l
root)
List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm
• rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n
distros
List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on
• dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n
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
Summarise/profile system calls made by
• strace -c ls >/dev/null
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 $$ List paths that process id has open
• lsof ~ List processes that have specified path open
Show network traffic except ssh. See also
• tcpdump not port 22
tcpdump_not_me
• ps -e -o pid,args --forest List processes in a hierarchy
• ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d' List processes by % cpu usage
List processes by mem (KB) usage. See also
• ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS
ps_mem.py
• ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state List all threads for a particular process
• ps -p 1,$$ -o etime= List elapsed wall time for particular process IDs
• watch -n.1 pstree -Uacp $$ Display a changing process subtree
• last reboot Show system reboot history
Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in
• free -m
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
List mounted filesystems on the system (and
• mount | column -t
align output)
• grep -F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info Show state of cells in laptop battery
# dmidecode -q | less Display SMBIOS/DMI information
How long has this disk (system) been powered
# smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours
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, ...
Powerful file manager that can browse rpm, tar,
• mc
ftp, ssh, ...
• gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing
• links Web browser
open a file or url with the registered desktop
• xdg-open .
application

© Jan 7 2008