Module 2 Cheat Sheet - Introduction to Linux
Commands
Getting information
Return your user name:
whoami
Return your user and group id:
id
Return operating system name, username, and other info:
uname -a
Display reference manual for a command:
man top
List available man pages, including a brief description for each command:
man -k .
Get help on a command:
curl --help
Return the current date and time:
date
Navigating and working with directories
List files and directories by date, newest to last:
ls -lrt
Find files in directory tree that end in .sh :
find -name \'\*.sh\'
Return path to present working directory:
pwd
Make a new directory:
mkdir new_folder
Change the current directory:
Up one level:
cd ../
To home:
cd ~` or `cd
To some other directory: cd path_to_directory
Remove directory verbosely:
rmdir temp_directory -v
Monitoring system performance and status
List selection of/all running processes and their PIDs:
ps
ps -e
Display resource usage:
top
List mounted file systems and usage:
df
Creating, copying, moving, and deleting files:
Create an empty file or update existing file's timestamp:
touch a_new_file.txt
Copy a file:
cp file.txt new_path/new_name.txt
Change file name or path:
mv this_file.txt that_path/that_file.txt
Remove a file verbosely:
rm this_old_file.txt -v
Working with file permissions
Change/modify file permissions to 'execute' for all users:
chmod +x my_script.sh
Change/modify file permissions to 'execute' only for you, the current user:
chmod u+x my_file.txt
Remove 'read' permissions from group and other users:
chmod go-r
Displaying file and string contents
Display file contents:
cat my_shell_script.sh
Display file contents page-by-page:
more ReadMe.txt
Display first 10 lines of file:
head -10 data_table.csv
Display last 10 lines of file:
tail -10 data_table.csv
Display string or variable value:
echo "I am not a robot"
echo "I am $USERNAME"
Basic text wrangling
Sorting lines and dropping duplicates:
Sort and display lines of file alphanumerically:
sort text_file.txt
In reverse order:
sort -r text_file.txt
Drop consecutive duplicated lines and display result:
uniq list_with_duplicated_lines.txt
Displaying basic stats:
Display the count of lines, words, or characters in a file:
Lines:
wc -l table_of_data.csv
Words:
wc -w my_essay.txt
Characters:
wc -m some_document.txt
Extracting lines of text containing a pattern:
Some frequently used options for grep :
Option Description
-n Print line numbers along with matching lines
-c Get the count of matching lines
-i Ignore the case of the text while matching
-v Print all lines which do not contain the pattern
-w Match only if the pattern matches whole words
Extract lines containing the word "hello", case insensitive and whole words only:
grep -iw hello a_bunch_of_hellos.txt
Extract lines containing the pattern "hello" from all files in the current directory ending in .txt :
grep -l hello *.txt
Merge two or more files line-by-line, aligned as columns:
Suppose you have three files containing the first and last names of your customers, plus their phone
numbers.
Use paste to align file contents into a Tab-delimited table, one row for each customer:
paste first_name.txt last_name.text phone_number.txt
Use a comma as a delimiter instead of the default Tab delimiter:
paste -d "," first_name.txt last_name.text phone_number.txt
Use the cut command to extract a column from a table-like file:
Suppose you have a text file whos rows consist of first and last names of customers, delimited by a
comma.
Extract first names, line-by-line:
cut -d "," -f 1 names.csv
Extract the second to fifth characters (bytes) from each line of a file:
cut -b 2-5 my_text_file.txt
Extract the characters (bytes) from each line of a file, starting from the 10th byte to the end of the line:
cut -b 10- my_text_file.txt
Compression and archiving
Archive a set of files:
tar -cvf my_archive.tar.gz file1 file2 file3
Compress a set of files:
zip my_zipped_files.zip file1 file2
zip my_zipped_folders.zip directory1 directory2
Extract files from a compressed zip archive:
unzip my_zipped_file.zip
unzip my_zipped_file.zip -d extract_to_this_direcory
Working with networking commands
Print hostname:
hostname
Send packets to URL and print response:
ping www.google.com
Display or configure system network interfaces:
ifconfig
ip
Display contents of file at a URL:
curl <url>
Download file from a URL:
wget <url>
Authors
Jeff Grossman
Sam Propupchuk
Other Contributors
Rav Ahuja
Change Log
Date (YYYY-MM-
Version Changed By Change Description
DD)
2023-05-04 1.4 Benny Li Added code blocks
2023-04-26 1.3 Nick Yi QA Pass
2023-04-10 1.2 Nick Yi ID Review
Jeff
2023-02-14 1.1 Update to reflect module content
Grossman
Jeff Split from existing reading and added new
2022-12-23 1.0
Grossman content
Copyright (c) 2023 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.
