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Master the command line, in one page

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README.md

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The Art of Command Line

Note: I'm planning to revise this and looking for a new co-author to help with expanding
this into a more comprehensive guide. While it's very popular, it could be broader and a bit
deeper. If you like to write and are close to being an expert on this material and willing to
consider helping, please drop me a note at josh (0x40) holloway.com. –jlevy, Holloway.
Thank you!
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Meta
Basics
Everyday use
Processing files and data
System debugging
One-liners
Obscure but useful
macOS only
Windows only
More resources
Disclaimer

Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it
improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways.
This is a selection of notes and tips on using the command-line that we've found useful
when working on Linux. Some tips are elementary, and some are fairly specific,
sophisticated, or obscure. This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items
here, you know a lot.

This work is the result of many authors and translators. Some of this originally appeared
on Quora, but it has since moved to GitHub, where people more talented than the original
author have made numerous improvements. Please submit a question if you have a
question related to the command line. Please contribute if you see an error or something
that could be better!

Meta
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Scope:

This guide is for both beginners and experienced users. The goals are breadth
(everything important), specificity (give concrete examples of the most common case),
and brevity (avoid things that aren't essential or digressions you can easily look up
elsewhere). Every tip is essential in some situation or significantly saves time over
alternatives.
This is written for Linux, with the exception of the "macOS only" and "Windows only"
sections. Many of the other items apply or can be installed on other Unices or macOS
(or even Cygwin).
The focus is on interactive Bash, though many tips apply to other shells and to
general Bash scripting.
It includes both "standard" Unix commands as well as ones that require special
package installs -- so long as they are important enough to merit inclusion.

Notes:

To keep this to one page, content is implicitly included by reference. You're smart
enough to look up more detail elsewhere once you know the idea or command to
Google. Use apt , yum , dnf , pacman , pip or brew (as appropriate) to install
new programs.
Use Explainshell to get a helpful breakdown of what commands, options, pipes etc.
do.

Basics
Learn basic Bash. Actually, type man bash and at least skim the whole thing; it's
pretty easy to follow and not that long. Alternate shells can be nice, but Bash is
powerful and always available (learning only zsh, fish, etc., while tempting on your
own laptop, restricts you in many situations, such as using existing servers).

Learn at least one text-based editor well. The nano editor is one of the simplest for
basic editing (opening, editing, saving, searching). However, for the power user in a
text terminal, there is no substitute for Vim ( vi ), the hard-to-learn but venerable, fast,
and full-featured editor. Many people also use the classic Emacs, particularly for
larger editing tasks. (Of course, any modern software developer working on an
extensive project is unlikely to use only a pure text-based editor and should also be
familiar with modern graphical IDEs and tools.)

Finding documentation:

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Know how to read official documentation with man (for the inquisitive, man man
lists the section numbers, e.g. 1 is "regular" commands, 5 is files/conventions,
and 8 are for administration). Find man pages with apropos .
Know that some commands are not executables, but Bash builtins, and that you
can get help on them with help and help -d . You can find out whether a
command is an executable, shell builtin or an alias by using type command .
curl cheat.sh/command will give a brief "cheat sheet" with common examples
of how to use a shell command.

Learn about redirection of output and input using > and < and pipes using | .
Know > overwrites the output file and >> appends. Learn about stdout and stderr.

Learn about file glob expansion with * (and perhaps ? and [ ... ] ) and quoting
and the difference between double " and single ' quotes. (See more on variable
expansion below.)

Be familiar with Bash job management: & , ctrl-z, ctrl-c, jobs , fg , bg , kill , etc.

Know ssh , and the basics of passwordless authentication, via ssh-agent , ssh-
add , etc.

Basic file management: ls and ls -l (in particular, learn what every column in ls
-l means), less , head , tail and tail -f (or even better, less +F ), ln and
ln -s (learn the differences and advantages of hard versus soft links), chown ,
chmod , du (for a quick summary of disk usage: du -hs * ). For filesystem
management, df , mount , fdisk , mkfs , lsblk . Learn what an inode is ( ls -i
or df -i ).

Basic network management: ip or ifconfig , dig , traceroute , route .

Learn and use a version control management system, such as git .

Know regular expressions well, and the various flags to grep / egrep . The -i , -o ,
-v , -A , -B , and -C options are worth knowing.

Learn to use apt-get , yum , dnf or pacman (depending on distro) to find and
install packages. And make sure you have pip to install Python-based command-
line tools (a few below are easiest to install via pip ).

Everyday use

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In Bash, use Tab to complete arguments or list all available commands and ctrl-r to
search through command history (after pressing, type to search, press ctrl-r
repeatedly to cycle through more matches, press Enter to execute the found
command, or hit the right arrow to put the result in the current line to allow editing).

In Bash, use ctrl-w to delete the last word, and ctrl-u to delete the content from
current cursor back to the start of the line. Use alt-b and alt-f to move by word, ctrl-a
to move cursor to beginning of line, ctrl-e to move cursor to end of line, ctrl-k to kill to
the end of the line, ctrl-l to clear the screen. See man readline for all the default
keybindings in Bash. There are a lot. For example alt-. cycles through previous
arguments, and alt-* expands a glob.

Alternatively, if you love vi-style key-bindings, use set -o vi (and set -o emacs to
put it back).

For editing long commands, after setting your editor (for example export
EDITOR=vim ), ctrl-x ctrl-e will open the current command in an editor for multi-line
editing. Or in vi style, escape-v.

To see recent commands, use history . Follow with !n (where n is the command
number) to execute again. There are also many abbreviations you can use, the most
useful probably being !$ for last argument and !! for last command (see
"HISTORY EXPANSION" in the man page). However, these are often easily replaced
with ctrl-r and alt-..

Go to your home directory with cd . Access files relative to your home directory with
the ~ prefix (e.g. ~/.bashrc ). In sh scripts refer to the home directory as $HOME .

To go back to the previous working directory: cd - .

If you are halfway through typing a command but change your mind, hit alt-# to add a
# at the beginning and enter it as a comment (or use ctrl-a, #, enter). You can then
return to it later via command history.

Use xargs (or parallel ). It's very powerful. Note you can control how many items
execute per line ( -L ) as well as parallelism ( -P ). If you're not sure if it'll do the right
thing, use xargs echo first. Also, -I{} is handy. Examples:

find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep some_function

cat hosts | xargs -I{} ssh root@{} hostname

pstree -p is a helpful display of the process tree.

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Use pgrep and pkill to find or signal processes by name ( -f is helpful).

Know the various signals you can send processes. For example, to suspend a
process, use kill -STOP [pid] . For the full list, see man 7 signal

Use nohup or disown if you want a background process to keep running forever.

Check what processes are listening via netstat -lntp or ss -plat (for TCP; add
-u for UDP) or lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -P -n (which also works on macOS).

See also lsof and fuser for open sockets and files.

See uptime or w to know how long the system has been running.

Use alias to create shortcuts for commonly used commands. For example, alias
ll='ls -latr' creates a new alias ll .

Save aliases, shell settings, and functions you commonly use in ~/.bashrc , and
arrange for login shells to source it. This will make your setup available in all your
shell sessions.

Put the settings of environment variables as well as commands that should be

executed when you login in ~/.bash_profile . Separate configuration will be needed
for shells you launch from graphical environment logins and cron jobs.

Synchronize your configuration files (e.g. .bashrc and .bash_profile ) among

various computers with Git.

Understand that care is needed when variables and filenames include whitespace.
Surround your Bash variables with quotes, e.g. "$FOO" . Prefer the -0 or -print0
options to enable null characters to delimit filenames, e.g. locate -0 pattern |
xargs -0 ls -al or find / -print0 -type d | xargs -0 ls -al . To iterate on
filenames containing whitespace in a for loop, set your IFS to be a newline only using
IFS=$'\n' .

In Bash scripts, use set -x (or the variant set -v , which logs raw input, including
unexpanded variables and comments) for debugging output. Use strict modes unless
you have a good reason not to: Use set -e to abort on errors (nonzero exit code).
Use set -u to detect unset variable usages. Consider set -o pipefail too, to
abort on errors within pipes (though read up on it more if you do, as this topic is a bit
subtle). For more involved scripts, also use trap on EXIT or ERR. A useful habit is
to start a script like this, which will make it detect and abort on common errors and
print a message:

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set -euo pipefail

trap "echo 'error: Script failed: see failed command above'" ERR

In Bash scripts, subshells (written with parentheses) are convenient ways to group
commands. A common example is to temporarily move to a different working
directory, e.g.

# do something in current dir

(cd /some/other/dir && other-command)
# continue in original dir

In Bash, note there are lots of kinds of variable expansion. Checking a variable exists:
${name:?error message} . For example, if a Bash script requires a single argument,
just write input_file=${1:?usage: $0 input_file} . Using a default value if a
variable is empty: ${name:-default} . If you want to have an additional (optional)
parameter added to the previous example, you can use something like
output_file=${2:-logfile} . If $2 is omitted and thus empty, output_file will be
set to logfile . Arithmetic expansion: i=$(( (i + 1) % 5 )) . Sequences:
{1..10} . Trimming of strings: ${var%suffix} and ${var#prefix} . For example if
var=foo.pdf , then echo ${var%.pdf}.txt prints foo.txt .

Brace expansion using { ... } can reduce having to re-type similar text and automate
combinations of items. This is helpful in examples like mv foo.{txt,pdf} some-dir
(which moves both files), cp somefile{,.bak} (which expands to cp somefile
somefile.bak ) or mkdir -p test-{a,b,c}/subtest-{1,2,3} (which expands all
possible combinations and creates a directory tree). Brace expansion is performed
before any other expansion.

The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable
expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right
fashion); word splitting; and filename expansion. (For example, a range like {1..20}
cannot be expressed with variables using {$a..$b} . Use seq or a for loop
instead, e.g., seq $a $b or for((i=a; i<=b; i++)); do ... ; done .)

The output of a command can be treated like a file via <(some command) (known as
process substitution). For example, compare local /etc/hosts with a remote one:

diff /etc/hosts <(ssh somehost cat /etc/hosts)

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When writing scripts you may want to put all of your code in curly braces. If the
closing brace is missing, your script will be prevented from executing due to a syntax
error. This makes sense when your script is going to be downloaded from the web,
since it prevents partially downloaded scripts from executing:

{
# Your code here
}

A "here document" allows redirection of multiple lines of input as if from a file:

cat <<EOF
input
on multiple lines
EOF

In Bash, redirect both standard output and standard error via: some-command
>logfile 2>&1 or some-command &>logfile . Often, to ensure a command does not
leave an open file handle to standard input, tying it to the terminal you are in, it is also
good practice to add </dev/null .

Use man ascii for a good ASCII table, with hex and decimal values. For general
encoding info, man unicode , man utf-8 , and man latin1 are helpful.

Use screen or tmux to multiplex the screen, especially useful on remote ssh
sessions and to detach and re-attach to a session. byobu can enhance screen or
tmux by providing more information and easier management. A more minimal
alternative for session persistence only is dtach .

In ssh, knowing how to port tunnel with -L or -D (and occasionally -R ) is useful,

e.g. to access web sites from a remote server.

It can be useful to make a few optimizations to your ssh configuration; for example,
this ~/.ssh/config contains settings to avoid dropped connections in certain
network environments, uses compression (which is helpful with scp over low-
bandwidth connections), and multiplex channels to the same server with a local
control file:

TCPKeepAlive=yes
ServerAliveInterval=15
ServerAliveCountMax=6
Compression=yes
ControlMaster auto
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ControlPath /tmp/%r@%h:%p
ControlPersist yes

A few other options relevant to ssh are security sensitive and should be enabled with
care, e.g. per subnet or host or in trusted networks: StrictHostKeyChecking=no ,
ForwardAgent=yes

Consider mosh an alternative to ssh that uses UDP, avoiding dropped connections
and adding convenience on the road (requires server-side setup).

To get the permissions on a file in octal form, which is useful for system configuration
but not available in ls and easy to bungle, use something like

stat -c '%A %a %n' /etc/timezone

For interactive selection of values from the output of another command, use percol
or fzf .

For interaction with files based on the output of another command (like git ), use
fpp (PathPicker).

For a simple web server for all files in the current directory (and subdirs), available to
anyone on your network, use: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 7777 (for port 7777 and
Python 2) and python -m http.server 7777 (for port 7777 and Python 3).

For running a command as another user, use sudo . Defaults to running as root; use
-u to specify another user. Use -i to login as that user (you will be asked for your
password).

For switching the shell to another user, use su username or su - username . The
latter with "-" gets an environment as if another user just logged in. Omitting the
username defaults to root. You will be asked for the password of the user you are
switching to.

Know about the 128K limit on command lines. This "Argument list too long" error is
common when wildcard matching large numbers of files. (When this happens
alternatives like find and xargs may help.)

For a basic calculator (and of course access to Python in general), use the python
interpreter. For example,

>>> 2+3
5
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Processing files and data

To locate a file by name in the current directory, find . -iname '*something*' (or
similar). To find a file anywhere by name, use locate something (but bear in mind
updatedb may not have indexed recently created files).

For general searching through source or data files, there are several options more
advanced or faster than grep -r , including (in rough order from older to newer)
ack , ag ("the silver searcher"), and rg (ripgrep).

To convert HTML to text: lynx -dump -stdin

For Markdown, HTML, and all kinds of document conversion, try pandoc . For
example, to convert a Markdown document to Word format: pandoc README.md --
from markdown --to docx -o temp.docx

If you must handle XML, xmlstarlet is old but good.

For JSON, use jq . For interactive use, also see jid and jiq .

For YAML, use shyaml .

For Excel or CSV files, csvkit provides in2csv , csvcut , csvjoin , csvgrep , etc.

For Amazon S3, s3cmd is convenient and s4cmd is faster. Amazon's aws and the
improved saws are essential for other AWS-related tasks.

Know about sort and uniq , including uniq's -u and -d options -- see one-liners
below. See also comm .

Know about cut , paste , and join to manipulate text files. Many people use cut
but forget about join .

Know about wc to count newlines ( -l ), characters ( -m ), words ( -w ) and bytes ( -

c ).

Know about tee to copy from stdin to a file and also to stdout, as in ls -al | tee
file.txt .

For more complex calculations, including grouping, reversing fields, and statistical
calculations, consider datamash .

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Know that locale affects a lot of command line tools in subtle ways, including sorting
order (collation) and performance. Most Linux installations will set LANG or other
locale variables to a local setting like US English. But be aware sorting will change if
you change locale. And know i18n routines can make sort or other commands run
many times slower. In some situations (such as the set operations or uniqueness
operations below) you can safely ignore slow i18n routines entirely and use traditional
byte-based sort order, using export LC_ALL=C .

You can set a specific command's environment by prefixing its invocation with the
environment variable settings, as in TZ=Pacific/Fiji date .

Know basic awk and sed for simple data munging. See One-liners for examples.

To replace all occurrences of a string in place, in one or more files:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/old-string/new-string/g' my-files-*.txt

To rename multiple files and/or search and replace within files, try repren . (In some
cases the rename command also allows multiple renames, but be careful as its
functionality is not the same on all Linux distributions.)

# Full rename of filenames, directories, and contents foo -> bar:

repren --full --preserve-case --from foo --to bar .
# Recover backup files whatever.bak -> whatever:
repren --renames --from '(.*)\.bak' --to '\1' *.bak
# Same as above, using rename, if available:
rename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak

As the man page says, rsync really is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying
tool. It's known for synchronizing between machines but is equally useful locally.
When security restrictions allow, using rsync instead of scp allows recovery of a
transfer without restarting from scratch. It also is among the fastest ways to delete
large numbers of files:

mkdir empty && rsync -r --delete empty/ some-dir && rmdir some-dir

For monitoring progress when processing files, use pv , pycp , pmonitor ,

progress , rsync --progress , or, for block-level copying, dd status=progress .

Use shuf to shuffle or select random lines from a file.

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Know sort 's options. For numbers, use -n , or -h for handling human-readable
numbers (e.g. from du -h ). Know how keys work ( -t and -k ). In particular, watch
out that you need to write -k1,1 to sort by only the first field; -k1 means sort
according to the whole line. Stable sort ( sort -s ) can be useful. For example, to sort
first by field 2, then secondarily by field 1, you can use sort -k1,1 | sort -s -
k2,2 .

If you ever need to write a tab literal in a command line in Bash (e.g. for the -t
argument to sort), press ctrl-v [Tab] or write $'\t' (the latter is better as you can
copy/paste it).

The standard tools for patching source code are diff and patch . See also
diffstat for summary statistics of a diff and sdiff for a side-by-side diff. Note
diff -r works for entire directories. Use diff -r tree1 tree2 | diffstat for a
summary of changes. Use vimdiff to compare and edit files.

For binary files, use hd , hexdump or xxd for simple hex dumps and bvi ,
hexedit or biew for binary editing.

Also for binary files, strings (plus grep , etc.) lets you find bits of text.

For binary diffs (delta compression), use xdelta3 .

To convert text encodings, try iconv . Or uconv for more advanced use; it supports
some advanced Unicode things. For example:

# Displays hex codes or actual names of characters (useful for debuggin

uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Hex;' < input.txt
uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Name;' < input.txt
# Lowercase and removes all accents (by expanding and dropping them):
uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Lower; ::Any-NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:]

To split files into pieces, see split (to split by size) and csplit (to split by a
pattern).

Date and time: To get the current date and time in the helpful ISO 8601 format, use
date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ" (other options are problematic). To manipulate
date and time expressions, use dateadd , datediff , strptime etc. from
dateutils .

Use zless , zmore , zcat , and zgrep to operate on compressed files.

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File attributes are settable via chattr and offer a lower-level alternative to file
permissions. For example, to protect against accidental file deletion the immutable
flag: sudo chattr +i /critical/directory/or/file

Use getfacl and setfacl to save and restore file permissions. For example:

getfacl -R /some/path > permissions.txt

setfacl --restore=permissions.txt

To create empty files quickly, use truncate (creates sparse file), fallocate (ext4,
xfs, btrfs and ocfs2 filesystems), xfs_mkfile (almost any filesystems, comes in
xfsprogs package), mkfile (for Unix-like systems like Solaris, Mac OS).

System debugging

For web debugging, curl and curl -I are handy, or their wget equivalents, or the
more modern httpie .

To know current cpu/disk status, the classic tools are top (or the better htop ),
iostat , and iotop . Use iostat -mxz 15 for basic CPU and detailed per-partition
disk stats and performance insight.

For network connection details, use netstat and ss .

For a quick overview of what's happening on a system, dstat is especially useful.

For broadest overview with details, use glances .

To know memory status, run and understand the output of free and vmstat . In
particular, be aware the "cached" value is memory held by the Linux kernel as file
cache, so effectively counts toward the "free" value.

Java system debugging is a different kettle of fish, but a simple trick on Oracle's and
some other JVMs is that you can run kill -3 <pid> and a full stack trace and heap
summary (including generational garbage collection details, which can be highly
informative) will be dumped to stderr/logs. The JDK's jps , jstat , jstack , jmap
are useful. SJK tools are more advanced.

Use mtr as a better traceroute, to identify network issues.

For looking at why a disk is full, ncdu saves time over the usual commands like du -
sh * .

To find which socket or process is using bandwidth, try iftop or nethogs .

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The ab tool (comes with Apache) is helpful for quick-and-dirty checking of web
server performance. For more complex load testing, try siege .

For more serious network debugging, wireshark , tshark , or ngrep .

Know about strace and ltrace . These can be helpful if a program is failing,
hanging, or crashing, and you don't know why, or if you want to get a general idea of
performance. Note the profiling option ( -c ), and the ability to attach to a running
process ( -p ). Use trace child option ( -f ) to avoid missing important calls.

Know about ldd to check shared libraries etc — but never run it on untrusted files.

Know how to connect to a running process with gdb and get its stack traces.

Use /proc . It's amazingly helpful sometimes when debugging live problems.
Examples: /proc/cpuinfo , /proc/meminfo , /proc/cmdline , /proc/xxx/cwd ,
/proc/xxx/exe , /proc/xxx/fd/ , /proc/xxx/smaps (where xxx is the process id
or pid).

When debugging why something went wrong in the past, sar can be very helpful. It
shows historic statistics on CPU, memory, network, etc.

For deeper systems and performance analyses, look at stap (SystemTap), perf ,
and sysdig .

Check what OS you're on with uname or uname -a (general Unix/kernel info) or

lsb_release -a (Linux distro info).

Use dmesg whenever something's acting really funny (it could be hardware or driver
issues).

If you delete a file and it doesn't free up expected disk space as reported by du ,
check whether the file is in use by a process: lsof | grep deleted | grep
"filename-of-my-big-file"

One-liners

A few examples of piecing together commands:

It is remarkably helpful sometimes that you can do set intersection, union, and
difference of text files via sort / uniq . Suppose a and b are text files that are
already uniqued. This is fast, and works on files of arbitrary size, up to many
gigabytes. (Sort is not limited by memory, though you may need to use the -T option

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if /tmp is on a small root partition.) See also the note about LC_ALL above and
sort 's -u option (left out for clarity below).

sort a b | uniq > c # c is a union b

sort a b | uniq -d > c # c is a intersect b
sort a b b | uniq -u > c # c is set difference a - b

Pretty-print two JSON files, normalizing their syntax, then coloring and paginating the
result:

diff <(jq --sort-keys . < file1.json) <(jq --sort-keys . <

file2.json) | colordiff | less -R

Use grep . * to quickly examine the contents of all files in a directory (so each line
is paired with the filename), or head -100 * (so each file has a heading). This can
be useful for directories filled with config settings like those in /sys , /proc , /etc .

Summing all numbers in the third column of a text file (this is probably 3X faster and
3X less code than equivalent Python):

awk '{ x += $3 } END { print x }' myfile

To see sizes/dates on a tree of files, this is like a recursive ls -l but is easier to

read than ls -lR :

find . -type f -ls

Say you have a text file, like a web server log, and a certain value that appears on
some lines, such as an acct_id parameter that is present in the URL. If you want a
tally of how many requests for each acct_id :

egrep -o 'acct_id=[0-9]+' access.log | cut -d= -f2 | sort | uniq -c | s

To continuously monitor changes, use watch , e.g. check changes to files in a

directory with watch -d -n 2 'ls -rtlh | tail' or to network settings while
troubleshooting your wifi settings with watch -d -n 2 ifconfig .

Run this function to get a random tip from this document (parses Markdown and
extracts an item):
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function taocl() {
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-li
sed '/cowsay[.]png/d' |
pandoc -f markdown -t html |
xmlstarlet fo --html --dropdtd |
xmlstarlet sel -t -v "(html/body/ul/li[count(p)>0])[$RANDOM mod las
xmlstarlet unesc | fmt -80 | iconv -t US
}

Obscure but useful

expr : perform arithmetic or boolean operations or evaluate regular expressions

m4 : simple macro processor

yes : print a string a lot

cal : nice calendar

env : run a command (useful in scripts)

printenv : print out environment variables (useful in debugging and scripts)

look : find English words (or lines in a file) beginning with a string

cut , paste and join : data manipulation

fmt : format text paragraphs

pr : format text into pages/columns

fold : wrap lines of text

column : format text fields into aligned, fixed-width columns or tables

expand and unexpand : convert between tabs and spaces

nl : add line numbers

seq : print numbers

bc : calculator

factor : factor integers

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gpg : encrypt and sign files

toe : table of terminfo entries

nc : network debugging and data transfer

socat : socket relay and tcp port forwarder (similar to netcat )

slurm : network traffic visualization

dd : moving data between files or devices

file : identify type of a file

tree : display directories and subdirectories as a nesting tree; like ls but recursive

stat : file info

time : execute and time a command

timeout : execute a command for specified amount of time and stop the process
when the specified amount of time completes.

lockfile : create semaphore file that can only be removed by rm -f

logrotate : rotate, compress and mail logs.

watch : run a command repeatedly, showing results and/or highlighting changes

when-changed : runs any command you specify whenever it sees file changed. See
inotifywait and entr as well.

tac : print files in reverse

comm : compare sorted files line by line

strings : extract text from binary files

tr : character translation or manipulation

iconv or uconv : conversion for text encodings

split and csplit : splitting files

sponge : read all input before writing it, useful for reading from then writing to the
same file, e.g., grep -v something some-file | sponge some-file

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units : unit conversions and calculations; converts furlongs per fortnight to twips per
blink (see also /usr/share/units/definitions.units )

apg : generates random passwords

xz : high-ratio file compression

ldd : dynamic library info

nm : symbols from object files

ab or wrk : benchmarking web servers

strace : system call debugging

mtr : better traceroute for network debugging

cssh : visual concurrent shell

rsync : sync files and folders over SSH or in local file system

wireshark and tshark : packet capture and network debugging

ngrep : grep for the network layer

host and dig : DNS lookups

lsof : process file descriptor and socket info

dstat : useful system stats

glances : high level, multi-subsystem overview

iostat : Disk usage stats

mpstat : CPU usage stats

vmstat : Memory usage stats

htop : improved version of top

last : login history

w : who's logged on

id : user/group identity info

sar : historic system stats

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iftop or nethogs : network utilization by socket or process

ss : socket statistics

dmesg : boot and system error messages

sysctl : view and configure Linux kernel parameters at run time

hdparm : SATA/ATA disk manipulation/performance

lsblk : list block devices: a tree view of your disks and disk partitions

lshw , lscpu , lspci , lsusb , dmidecode : hardware information, including CPU,

BIOS, RAID, graphics, devices, etc.

lsmod and modinfo : List and show details of kernel modules.

fortune , ddate , and sl : um, well, it depends on whether you consider steam
locomotives and Zippy quotations "useful"

macOS only
These are items relevant only on macOS.

Package management with brew (Homebrew) and/or port (MacPorts). These can
be used to install on macOS many of the above commands.

Copy output of any command to a desktop app with pbcopy and paste input from
one with pbpaste .

To enable the Option key in macOS Terminal as an alt key (such as used in the
commands above like alt-b, alt-f, etc.), open Preferences -> Profiles -> Keyboard and
select "Use Option as Meta key".

To open a file with a desktop app, use open or open -a

/Applications/Whatever.app .

Spotlight: Search files with mdfind and list metadata (such as photo EXIF info) with
mdls .

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Be aware macOS is based on BSD Unix, and many commands (for example ps ,
ls , tail , awk , sed ) have many subtle variations from Linux, which is largely
influenced by System V-style Unix and GNU tools. You can often tell the difference by
noting a man page has the heading "BSD General Commands Manual." In some
cases GNU versions can be installed, too (such as gawk and gsed for GNU awk
and sed). If writing cross-platform Bash scripts, avoid such commands (for example,
consider Python or perl ) or test carefully.

To get macOS release information, use sw_vers .

Windows only
These items are relevant only on Windows.

Ways to obtain Unix tools under Windows

Access the power of the Unix shell under Microsoft Windows by installing Cygwin.
Most of the things described in this document will work out of the box.

On Windows 10, you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which provides a
familiar Bash environment with Unix command line utilities.

If you mainly want to use GNU developer tools (such as GCC) on Windows, consider
MinGW and its MSYS package, which provides utilities such as bash, gawk, make
and grep. MSYS doesn't have all the features compared to Cygwin. MinGW is
particularly useful for creating native Windows ports of Unix tools.

Another option to get Unix look and feel under Windows is Cash. Note that only very
few Unix commands and command-line options are available in this environment.

Useful Windows command-line tools

You can perform and script most Windows system administration tasks from the
command line by learning and using wmic .

Native command-line Windows networking tools you may find useful include ping ,
ipconfig , tracert , and netstat .

You can perform many useful Windows tasks by invoking the Rundll32 command.

Cygwin tips and tricks

Install additional Unix programs with the Cygwin's package manager.

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Use mintty as your command-line window.

Access the Windows clipboard through /dev/clipboard .

Run cygstart to open an arbitrary file through its registered application.

Access the Windows registry with regtool .

Note that a C:\ Windows drive path becomes /cygdrive/c under Cygwin, and that
Cygwin's / appears under C:\cygwin on Windows. Convert between Cygwin and
Windows-style file paths with cygpath . This is most useful in scripts that invoke
Windows programs.

More resources
awesome-shell: A curated list of shell tools and resources.
awesome-osx-command-line: A more in-depth guide for the macOS command line.
Strict mode for writing better shell scripts.
shellcheck: A shell script static analysis tool. Essentially, lint for bash/sh/zsh.
Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: The sadly complex minutiae on how to handle
filenames correctly in shell scripts.
Data Science at the Command Line: More commands and tools helpful for doing data
science, from the book of the same name

Disclaimer
With the exception of very small tasks, code is written so others can read it. With power
comes responsibility. The fact you can do something in Bash doesn't necessarily mean
you should! ;)

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

License.

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