AppendixA.The Most Essential Linux Commands

Appendix A. The Most Essential Linux Commands

If you are new to the world of Linux, working on the command line can seem a daunting challenge. Although there is no substitute for a quality training course and in-depth personal practice and experimentation, sometimes simply finding the right command can be the difference between endless suffering and a quick solution to your problem.

To help ease your transition to the Linux world, this appendix has been compiled with some of the more common and important commands used at the terminal. Please keep in mind that this appendix is certainly not intended to provide every command you will likely need in your command-line work, but if you are struggling for that one important command, you may find this guide useful.

With that in mind, these commands have been organized in the following sections:

• Getting Help

• File Management

• Permissions and Identity

• Viewing Files

• Text Processing

• Finding Files and Text

• Regular Expressions

• Environmental Commands

• Working with Processes

• Troubleshooting Tools

• Compression Utilities

• Networking Utilities

• Working with Filesystems

• System Shutdown and Restart

NOTE

This appendix is intended only as an introduction to these utilities. For more information regarding each utility, see the respective man page using man COMMAND.