Here are 100 essential Unix commands categorized by their purpose:
1. File and Directory Management
1. ls - List directory contents.
2. cd - Change directory.
3. pwd - Print working directory.
4. mkdir - Create a new directory.
5. rmdir - Remove empty directories.
6. cp - Copy files or directories.
7. mv - Move or rename files or directories.
8. rm - Remove files or directories.
9. touch - Create an empty file or update file timestamps.
10. cat - Concatenate and display file contents.
11. more - View file contents one screen at a time.
12. less - View file contents with backward movement capability.
13. head - Display the beginning of a file.
14. tail - Display the end of a file.
15. find - Search for files and directories.
16. locate - Find files by name.
17. du - Estimate file space usage.
18. df - Report file system disk space usage.
19. chmod - Change file permissions.
20. chown - Change file owner and group.
21. ln - Create hard and symbolic links.
22. alias - Create a shortcut for a command.
23. unalias - Remove an alias.
24. stat - Display file or filesystem status.
25. file - Determine file type.
2. Text Processing
26. echo - Display a line of text.
27. grep - Search text using patterns.
28. sed - Stream editor for filtering and transforming text.
29. awk - Pattern scanning and processing language.
30. cut - Remove sections from each line of files.
31. sort - Sort lines of text files.
32. uniq - Report or omit repeated lines.
33. wc - Word, line, character, and byte count.
34. tr - Translate or delete characters.
35. diff - Compare files line by line.
36. patch - Apply changes to files.
37. split - Split a file into pieces.
38. join - Join lines of two files on a common field.
39. paste - Merge lines of files.
40. tee - Read from standard input and write to standard output and files.
3. Process Management
41. ps - Report a snapshot of current processes.
42. top - Display Linux tasks.
43. htop - Interactive process viewer.
44. kill - Send a signal to a process.
45. killall - Kill processes by name.
46. bg - Resume a suspended job in the background.
47. fg - Bring a background job to the foreground.
48. jobs - List active jobs.
49. nice - Run a command with modified scheduling priority.
50. renice - Alter the priority of running processes.
51. nohup - Run a command immune to hangups.
52. strace - Trace system calls and signals.
53. lsof - List open files.
4. Networking
54. ping - Check the network connection to a host.
55. ifconfig - Configure a network interface.
56. ip - Show/manipulate routing, devices, and tunnels.
57. netstat - Network statistics.
58. ss - Another utility to investigate sockets.
59. curl - Transfer data from or to a server.
60. wget - Non-interactive network downloader.
61. scp - Secure copy (remote file copy program).
62. ssh - OpenSSH SSH client (remote login program).
63. telnet - User interface to the TELNET protocol.
64. ftp - File Transfer Protocol client.
65. nc - Netcat, a versatile networking tool.
66. nmap - Network exploration tool and security scanner.
67. hostname - Show or set the system's hostname.
68. route - Show/manipulate the IP routing table.
5. System Management
69. uname - Print system information.
70. uptime - Tell how long the system has been running.
71. whoami - Print the current user name.
72. id - Print real and effective user and group IDs.
73. env - Print environment or run a command in a modified environment.
74. export - Set an environment variable.
75. alias - Create an alias for a command.
76. df - Report filesystem disk space usage.
77. free - Display memory usage.
78. top - Display tasks.
79. shutdown - Bring the system down.
80. reboot - Restart the computer.
81. mount - Mount a filesystem.
82. umount - Unmount a filesystem.
83. cron - Schedule tasks to run at intervals.
84. crontab - Schedule a command to run at a later time.
85. systemctl - Control the systemd system and service manager.
86. service - Run a System V init script.
87. dmesg - Print or control the kernel ring buffer.
88. journalctl - Query the systemd journal.
89. lsblk - List information about block devices.
90. fdisk - Partition table manipulator for Linux.
6. Compression and Archiving
91. tar - Archive files.
92. gzip - Compress files.
93. gunzip - Decompress files.
94. zip - Package and compress files.
95. unzip - Extract compressed files in a ZIP archive.
96. bzip2 - Compress files using the Burrows-Wheeler block-sorting text
compression algorithm.
97. bunzip2 - Decompress files using bzip2.
98. xz - Compress files using the LZMA algorithm.
99. unxz - Decompress files compressed by xz.
100. 7z - File archiver with a high compression ratio.
