basic file stuff

• touch - create file
• mkdir - create directory
• cp - copy
• mv - move
• rm - delete
• ln - create symlink
• ls - list directory

how big is it

• wc - word count
• du - file size in bytes
• df - filesystem usage

slice & dice files

• sed - replace regex
• tr - replace character
• grep - search file
• cut - get column
• awk - get column (+ more)
• sort - sort lines
• uniq - unique lines
• head - first 10 lines
• tail - last 10 lines

filesystems

• mount - mount a filesystem
• umount - unmount
• dd - copy data to a disk

manage processes

• ps - list processes
• lsof - list open files
• kill - send a signal
• pkill - fancy kill
• top - who’s using CPU?
• uptime - time since reboot

permissions

• chown - change owner
• chmod - change permissions

time stuff

• time - measure runtime
• date - current time
• sleep - wait X seconds
• cal - cute calendar

useful with pipes

• less - scroll text
• cat - print file contents
• tee - stdin -> file + stdout
• xargs - run cmd for each line
• find - find files by name

compression

• tar - make/extract tar files
• gzip - compress with gzip
• gunzip - decompress
• zip - compress with zip
• unzip - decompress

& more

• which - find cmd on PATH
• man - read man page
• crontab - edit crontab
• md5sum - calculate md5sum
• diff - diff files