command Description

Show commands pertinent to string.

• apropos whatis
See also threadsafe
• man -t man | ps2pdf - > man.pdf make a pdf of a manual page
which command Show full path name of command
time command See how long a command takes
Start stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See
• time cat
also sw
Run a low priority command (The
• nice info
"info" reader in this case)
Make shell (script) low priority. Use
• renice 19 -p $$
for non interactive tasks
dir navigation
• cd - Go to previous directory
• cd Go to $HOME directory
Go to dir, execute command and
(cd dir && command)
return to current dir
Put current dir on stack so you can
• pushd .
popd back to it
file searching
• alias l='ls -l --color=auto' quick dir listing
List files by date. See also newest and
• ls -lrt
find_mm_yyyy
Print in 9 columns to width of
• ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS
terminal
Search 'expr' in this dir and below.
find -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr'
See also findrepo
Search all regular files for 'example'
find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example'
in this dir and below
Search all regular files for 'example'
find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example'
in this dir
find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo Process each item with multiple
$dir; echo cmd2; done commands (in while loop)
Find files not readable by all (useful
• find -type f ! -perm -444
for web site)
Find dirs not accessible by all (useful
• find -type d ! -perm -111
for web site)
Search cached index for names. This
• locate -r 'file[^/]*\.txt'
re is like glob *file*.txt
Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for
• look reference
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/
Extract archive (use gzip instead of
bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x
bzip2 for tar.gz files)
tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd Make encrypted archive of dir/ on
of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' remote machine
find dir/ -name '*.txt' | tar -c --files-from=- | bzip2 Make archive of subset of dir/ and
> dir_txt.tar.bz2 below
find dir/ -name '*.txt' | xargs cp -a --target- Make copy of subset of dir/ and
directory=dir_txt/ --parents 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/ && Copy (with permissions) contents of
tar -x -p ) copy/ dir to /where/to/
( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to
/where/to/ && tar -x -p' remote:/where/to/ dir
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote
Backup harddisk to remote machine
'dd of=sda.gz'
rsync (Network efficient file copier: Use the --dry-run option for testing)
Only get diffs. Do multiple times for
rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file
troublesome downloads
Locally copy with rate limit. It's like
rsync --bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile
nice for I/O
rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ Mirror web site (using compression
remote.com:'~/public_html' and encryption)
rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e Synchronize current directory with
ssh . remote:/dir/ remote one
ssh (Secure SHell)
Run command on $HOST as $USER
ssh $USER@$HOST command
(default command=shell)
Run GUI command on
• ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes
$HOSTNAME as $USER
Copy with permissions to $USER's
scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/
home directory on $HOST
Forward connections to
ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST $HOSTNAME:8080 out to
$HOST:80
Forward connections from
ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST
$HOST:1434 in to imap:143
wget (multi purpose download tool)
• (cd dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk Store local browsable version of a
 http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) page to the current dir
Continue downloading a partially
wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file
downloaded file
wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A '*.jpg' Download a set of files to the current
http://www.example.com/dir/ directory
wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ FTP supports globbing directly
wget -q -O-
• http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep 'a Process output directly
href' | head
echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir
Do a low priority download (limit to
wget --limit-rate=20k url
20KB/s in this case)
wget -nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file
Efficiently update a local copy of a
wget --mirror http://www.example.com/
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
Manually set ethernet interface speed
duplex full
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
Add (or del) ip and mask
ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0
(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
tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1:0 netem delay Add 20ms latency to loopback device
•
20msec (for testing)
• tc qdisc del dev lo root Remove latency added above
Lookup DNS ip address for name or
• host pixelbeat.org
vice versa
Lookup local ip address (equivalent
• hostname -i
to host `hostname`)
Lookup whois info for hostname or ip
• whois pixelbeat.org
address
• netstat -tupl List internet services on a system
List active connections to/from
• netstat -tup
system
windows networking (Note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific
networking support)
Find windows machines. See also
• smbtree
findsmb
Find the windows (netbios) name
nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4
associated with ip address
List shares on windows machine or
smbclient -L windows_box
samba server
mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest
Mount a windows share
//windows_box/share /mnt/share
Send popup to windows machine (off
echo 'message' | smbclient -M windows_box
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
Escape shell metacharacters active
sed 's/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g'
within double quotes
• seq 10 | sed "s/^/ /; s/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" Right align numbers
sed -n '1000p;1000q' 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
• 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
Symmetric Difference of unsorted
sort file1 file2 | uniq -u
files
join -a1 -a2 file1 file2 Union of sorted files
join file1 file2 Intersection of sorted files
join -v2 file1 file2 Difference of sorted files
join -v1 -v2 file1 file2 Symmetric Difference of sorted files
math
• echo '(1 + sqrt(5))/2' | bc -l Quick math (Calculate φ). See also bc
• echo 'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/ More complex (int) e.g. This shows
 ((pad+min)*8)' | bc max FastE packet rate
echo 'pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/
• Python handles scientific notation
((pad+min)*8)' | python
echo 'pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/
• Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size
((pad+x)*8)' | gnuplot -persist
Base conversion (decimal to
• echo 'obase=16; ibase=10; 64206' | bc
hexadecimal)
Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell
• echo $((0x2dec))
arithmetic expansion))
• units -t '100m/9.69s' 'miles/hour' Unit conversion (metric to imperial)
• units -t '500GB' 'GiB' Unit conversion (SI to IEC prefixes)
• units -t '1 googol' Definition lookup
Add a column of numbers. See also
• seq 100 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc
add and funcpy
calendar
• cal -3 Display a calendar
Display a calendar for a particular
• cal 9 1752
month year
What date is it this friday. See also
• date -d fri
day
exit a script unless it's the last day of
• [ $(date -d "tomorrow" +%d) = "01" ] || exit
the month
• date --date='25 Dec' +%A What day does xmas fall on, this year
Convert seconds since the epoch
• date --date='@2147483647'
(1970-01-01 UTC) to date
What time is it on West coast of US
• TZ=':America/Los_Angeles' date
(use tzselect to find TZ)
echo "mail -s 'get the train' [email protected]
Email reminder
< /dev/null" | at 17:45
echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage cooker" |
• Popup reminder
at "NOW + 30 minutes"
locales
Print number with thousands
• printf "%'d\n" 1234
grouping appropriate to locale
get ls to do thousands grouping
• BLOCK_SIZE=\'1 ls -l
appropriate to locale
• echo "I live in `locale territory`" Extract info from locale database
Lookup locale info for specific
• LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix
country. See also ccodes
List fields available in locale
• locale | cut -d= -f1 | xargs locale -kc | less
database
recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos)
Show available conversions (aliases
• recode -l | less
on each line)
 Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto
recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt
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.txt > file.qp Quoted printable decode
recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html Text to HTML
• recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro Lookup table of characters
Show what a code represents in latin-
• echo -n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump
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
Create cdrom image from contents of
mkisofs -V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz
dir
Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir
mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir
(read only)
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW
gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI
dev=/dev/cdrom - -scanbus to confirm dev)
Rip audio tracks from CD to wav
cdparanoia -B
files in current dir
Make audio CD from all wavs in
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio *.wav
current dir (see also cdrdao)
oggenc --tracknum='track' track.cdda.wav -o
Make ogg file from wav file
'track.ogg'
disk space (See also FSlint)
• ls -lSr Show files by size, biggest last
Show top disk users in current dir.
• du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head
See also dutop
Show free space on mounted
• df -h
filesystems
Show free inodes on mounted
• df -i
filesystems
Show disks partitions sizes and types
• fdisk -l
(run as root)
rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort List all packages by installed size
•
-k1,1n (Bytes) on rpm distros
dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;10}\t$ List all packages by installed size
•
{Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n (KBytes) on deb distros
Create a large test file (taking no
• dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test
space). See also truncate
 truncate data of file or create an
• > file
empty file
monitoring/debugging
• tail -f /var/log/messages Monitor messages in a log file
Summarise/profile system calls made
• strace -c ls >/dev/null
by command
• strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null List system calls made by command
• ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null List library calls made by command
• lsof -p $$ List paths that process id has open
List processes that have specified
• lsof ~
path open
Show network traffic except ssh. See
• tcpdump not port 22
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
• List processes by % cpu usage
pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d'
ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr List processes by mem usage. See
•
-TW$COLUMNS also ps_mem.py
List all threads for a particular
• ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state
process
• ps -p 1,2 List info for particular process IDs
• last reboot Show system reboot history
Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-
• free -m
m displays in MB)
• watch -n.1 'cat /proc/interrupts' Watch changeable data continuously
system information (see also sysinfo) ('#' means root access is required)
Show kernel version and system
• uname -a
architecture
Show name and version of
• head -n1 /etc/issue
distribution
Show all partitions registered on the
• cat /proc/partitions
system
• grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo Show RAM total seen by the system
• grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo Show CPU(s) info
• lspci -tv Show PCI info
• lsusb -tv Show USB info
List mounted filesystems on the
• mount | column -t
system (and align output)
• grep -F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info Show state of cells in laptop battery
# dmidecode -q | less Display SMBIOS/DMI information
How long has this disk (system) been
# smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours
powered on in total
# hdparm -i /dev/sda Show info about disk sda
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda Do a read speed test on disk sda
Test for unreadable blocks on disk
# badblocks -s /dev/sda
sda
interactive (see also linux keyboard shortcuts)
Line editor used by bash, python, bc,
• readline
gnuplot, ...
Virtual terminals with detach
• screen
capability, ...
Powerful file manager that can
• mc
browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, ...
• gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing
• links Web browser
open a file or url with the registered
• xdg-open http://www.pixelbeat.org/
desktop application
miscellaneous
Handy hexdump. (usage e.g.: • hd
• alias hd='od -Ax -tx1z -v'
/proc/self/cmdline | less)
Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: •
• alias realpath='readlink -f'
realpath ~/../$USER)
• set | grep $USER Search current environment
Set file timestamp
touch -c -t 0304050607 file
(YYMMDDhhmm)
Serve current directory tree at http://
• python -m SimpleHTTPServer
$HOSTNAME:8000/
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