Difference between revisions of "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)