Raj Blogs: Common UNIX Commands

cd - Change Directory. (Just like in dos)
mkdir - Make Directory.
rmdir - Removes a Directory that is empty!
ls - List directory. (Like dir in Windows)
cat – Short for concatenate. It was used to concatenate two filestogether via cat file1 file2 >file3 Didn‘t know that did you. Theechoing out to standard out gave cat a whole new meaning to the users.
more - Just like less. It pages output to the screen.
mv - Move. For moving files and directories around
rm Remove a file. Also rm rf for removing a folder and it‘scontent.
grep - Used to search for text within a stream or files. (man regex)
vi – A text based editor. You‘ll find that it‘s really a symboliclink to vim now a days.
rlogin - Remote login. I hope your admins disabled this!
passwd - Used to change your password.
ps - Used to processes.
nice - Run a program with lower priority so you don't hog CPU.
kill – Terminates a program. You can select what signal you want tokill a program with also. -9
gzip - Compresses files.
gunzip - Uncompresses files.
tee – Pipe your output to standard out and to a file. Nice forwatching a process and logging.
sort - A sort program
sed – Stream Editor. Excellent program to modify files or streams!(man regex)
uniq - Unique program.
awk – An excellent program to parse up streams or files into tokens.It supports a hellva lot of cool things and you can complete writeprograms with it. (man nawk also)
chgrp - Change Group
chown - Change owner
pwd - Current working directory.
find – Used to find programs and you can also execute commands oneach match found.
wc - Word, line, letter count program. For you line counting whores.
which - Finds a location of a program that's in your path.
last - See who last logged in.
du - Disk usage.
df - Disk Free
top – Running processes with CPU and other information thatrefreshes.
watch – Repeats a command and updates the screen with only thechanges
login - Logging in
telnet - Connect to another machine
logout - Logging out
emacs - Using the emacs text editor
cp - Making a copy of a file
chmod - Controlling access to your files
cmp - Comparing two files
compress - Compress a file
pine Using Pine to send and receive email
mush - The mush electronic mail system
talk - Talk to another user
write - Write messages to another user
ftp - Transferring files with ftp
man - Manual pages
quota v Finding out your available disk space quota
ical - Using the Ical personal organizer
finger - Getting information about a user
who - Finding out who's logged on
lpr - Printing
lprm - Removing a print job
lpq - Checking the print queues
ps - Finding your processes
kill - Killing a process
nohup - Continuing a job after logout
nice - Changing the priority of a job
& - What is a background process?
Cntrl-z - Suspending a process
fg - Resuming a suspended process