BasicLinuxCommands

There are some of the basic shell commands that you will need. You can type in the following command to see detailed documentation for any command.

man <command>
  • View directory listing.
ls (list directory contents)
ls -l (verbose directory listing)
ls -ltrh (verbose directory listing, sorted in reverse order (r)
according to time (t), file sizes displayed in
human-readable format (h))
  • Create/remove directory.
mkdir dir_name (make a directory called dir_name)
rmdir dir_name (remove directory dir_name. dir_name must be empty)
  • Copy/move files and directories.
cp file_name copy_file_name (copies file_name to copy_file_name)
mv file_name new_file_name (moves file_name to new_file_name)
cp -R * dest (copies all files and directories in the current
working directory to a destination directory)
  • Delete files and directories.
rm file_name (remove (delete) file_name)
rm -f file_name (force delete file_name)
rm -rf * (force delete all files and directories)
  • Dump file contents on screen. Actually concatenates files and print on standard output.
cat file_name (view the contents of file_name)
cat file1 file2 file3 ... (cat also works for multiple files)
  • Find out current working directory
pwd (print name of current working directory)


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