Command List

General Commands
Command Description
apropos word Show commands pertinent to word.
which command Show full path name of command
time command See how long a command takes
time cat Start stopwatch. Ctrl-D to stop.
nice info Run a low priority command (info in this case)
renice 19 -p $$ Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks
look prefix Quickly search (sorted) dictionary
grep –color expr…ion /usr/share/dict/words Highlight occurances of regular expression in dictionary
gpg -c file Encrypt file
gpg file.gpg Decrypt file
echo “mail -s ‘get the train’ P@draigBrady.com < /dev/null” | at 17:45 Email reminder
watch -n1 ‘cat /proc/interrupts’ Watch changeable data continuously
alias hd=’od -Ax -tx1z -v’ Handy hexdump. (usage e.g.: • hd /proc/self/cmdline | less)
alias realpath=’readlink -f’ Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: • realpath ~/../$USER)
set | grep $USER Search current environment
ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS Print in 9 columns to width of terminal
touch -c -t 0304050607 file Set file timestamp (YYMMDDhhmm)
Directory Navigation
Command Description
cd - Go to previous directory
cd Go to home directory
(cd dir && command) Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir
pushd . Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it
CDROM Commands
Command Description
gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz Save copy of data cdrom
mkisofs -V NAME -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz Create cdrom image from contents of dir
mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only)
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW
gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev)
cdparanoia -B Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio *.wav Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao)
oggenc –tracknum=’track’ track.cdda.wav -o ‘track.ogg’ Make ogg file from wav file
Archives
Command Description
tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 Make archive of dir/
bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar x Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files)
tar c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg’ Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine
find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | tar c –files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 Make archive of subset of dir/ and below
find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | xargs cp -a –target-directory=dir_txt/ –parents Make copy of subset of dir/ and below
( tar c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar x -p ) Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir
( cd /dir/to/copy && tar c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar x -p ) Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/
( tar c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote ‘cd /where/to/ && tar x -p’ Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir
dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda | gzip | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=hda.gz’ Backup harddisk to remote machine
Rsync
Command Description
rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads
rsync –bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile Locally copy with rate limit. It’s like nice for I/O
rsync -az -e ssh –delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:’~/public_html’ Mirror web site (using compression and encryption)
rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ <b>.</b> && rsync -auz -e ssh <b>.</b> remote:/dir/ Synchronize current directory with remote one
File Searching
Command Description
alias l=’ls -l –color=auto’ quick dir listing
ls -lrt List files by date. See also <a href=”scripts/newest”>newest</a>
find -name ‘*.[ch]‘ | xargs grep -E ‘expr’ Search ‘expr’ in this dir and below.
find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F ’string’ Search all regular files for ’string’ in this dir and below
find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F ’string’ Search all regular files for ’string’ in this dir
find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F ’string’ Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop)
find -type f ! -perm -444 Find files not readable by all (useful for web site)
find -type d ! -perm -111 Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site)
locate -r ‘file[^/]*\.txt’ Search cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt
Network
Command Description
ip link show List interfaces
ethtool interface List interface status
ip link set dev eth0 name wan Rename eth0 to wan
ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 Add ip and mask(255.255.255.0)
ip link set dev interface up Bring interface up (or down)
ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 Set default gateway to 1.2.3.254
host pixelbeat.org Lookup ip address for name or vice versa
hostname -i Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`)
netstat -tupl List internet services on a system
netstat -tup List active connections to/from system
Wget (download tool)
Command Description
(cd cmdline && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) Store local browsable version of a page to the current dir
wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file Continue downloading a partially downloaded file
wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A “*.jpg” http://www.example.com/ Download a set of files to the current directory
wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ FTP supports globbing directly
wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep ‘a href’ | head Process output directly
echo ‘wget url’ | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir
wget –limit-rate=20k url Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case)
wget -nv –spider –force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file
wget –mirror http://www.example.com/ Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy from cron)
Windows (samba)
Command Description
smbtree Find windows machines. See also findsmb
nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 Find the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address
smbclient -L windows_box List shares on windows machine or samba server
mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share Mount a windows share
echo ‘message’ | smbclient -M windows_box Send popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2)
Math
Command Description
echo ‘(1 + sqrt(5))/2′ | bc -l Quick math
echo ‘obase=16; ibase=10; 123′ | bc Base conversion (decimal to hexadecimal)
echo $((0×2dec)) Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion))
echo ‘pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | bc More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate
echo ‘pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | python Python handles scientific notation
echo ‘pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)’ | gnuplot -persist Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size
String foo
Command Description
sed ’s/string1/string2/g’ Replace string1 with string2
sed ’s/\(.*\)1/\12/g’ Modify anystring1 to anystring2
sed ‘/ *#/d; /^ *$/d’ Remove comments and blank lines
sed ‘:a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta’ Concatenate lines with trailing \
sed ’s/[ \t]*$//’ Remove trailing spaces from lines
sed ’s/\([\\`\\"$\\\\]\)/\\\1/g’ Escape shell metacharacters active within double quotes
sed -n ‘1000p;1000q’ Print 1000th line
sed -n ‘10,20p;20q’ Print lines 10 to 20
sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u Show lines in file2 not in file1
echo ‘Test’ | tr ‘[:lower:]‘ ‘[:upper:]‘ Case conversion
tr -dc ‘[:print:]‘ < /dev/urandom Filter non printable characters
grep ‘processor’ /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l Count lines
Calendar
Command Description
cal -3 Display a calendar
cal 9 1752 Display a calendar for a particular month year
date -d fri What date is it this friday.
date –date=’25 Dec’ +%A What day does xmas fall on, this year
date –date ‘1970-01-01 UTC 1234567890 seconds’ Convert number of seconds since the epoch to a date
TZ=’:America/Los_Angeles’ date What time is it on West coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ)
Locales
Command Description
printf “%’d\n” 1234 Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale
echo “I live in `locale territory`” Extract info from locale database
locale | cut -d= -f1 | xargs locale -kc | less List fields in locale database
LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix Lookup locale info for specific country. See also <a href=”scripts/ccodes”>ccodes</a>
Disk Space
Command Description
ls -lSr Show files, biggest last
du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir.
df -h Show free disk space
df -i Show free inodes
fdisk -l Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root)
rpm -q -a –queryformat ‘%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n’ | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros
dpkg-query -W –showformat=’${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n’ | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros
dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test Create a large test file (taking no space)
Monitoring / Debugging
Command Description
strace -c ls >/dev/null Summarise/profile system calls made by command
strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null List system calls made by command
ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null List library calls made by command
lsof -p $$ List paths that process id has open
lsof ~
tcpdump not port 22 Show network traffic except ssh.
ps -e -o pid,args –forest List processes in a hierarchy
ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args –sort pcpu | sed ‘/^ 0.0 /d’ List processes by % cpu usage
ps -e -o rss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS List processes by mem usage.
ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state List all threads for a particular process
ps -p 1,2 List info for particular process IDs
for wtmp in `ls -t /var/log/wtmp*`; do last reboot -f $wtmp; done | grep reboot Show system reboot history.
free -m Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB)
System Info
Command Description
hdparm -i /dev/hda Show info about disk hda
hdparm -tT /dev/hda Do a read speed test on disk hda
badblocks -s /dev/hda Test for unreadable blocks on disk hda
mount | column -t Show mounted filesystems on the system (and align output)
cat /proc/partitions Show all partitions registered on the system
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo Show RAM total seen by the system
grep “model name” /proc/cpuinfo Show CPU(s) info
lspci -tv Show PCI info
lsusb -tv Show USB info
Recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos)
Command Description
recode -l | less Show available conversions (aliases on each line)
recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt Windows “ansi” to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion)
recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt Windows utf8 to local charset
recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt Latin9 (western europe) to utf8
recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 Base64 encode
recode /qp.. < file.txt > file.qp Quoted printable decode
recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html Text to HTML
recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro Lookup table of characters
echo -n 0×80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap
echo -n 0×20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x Show latin-9 encoding
echo -n 0×20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x Show utf-8 encoding
Interactive
Command Description
mc Powerful filemanager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, …
screen Virtual terminals with detach capability, …
links Web browser
gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing
octave Matlab like environment

Useful Commands

Dumping a mySQL to a sql file

mysqldump -l --opt databasename &gt; /root/file/location/filename.sql  -u user --password=whateverthepass

Importing mySQL dump file

mysql databasename &lt; /root/file/location/filename.sql -u user --password=whateverthepass

Copying Entire Folder of Files

cp - Ru /root/file/location/* /where/it/should/go --reply=yes

Copying an entire folder to another server

tar zcf - localfolder/ \ | ssh 192.1.1.1 "cd folder/to/copy/to; tar zpxvf -"

If you want to extract one file from the .tar.gz file use

gzip -dc file.tar.gz | tar xf - pathname/filename

The pathname and filename should be exactly as given in the .tar.gz file. If you want more than one file append their names, again include pathname, at the end of the command.

Symlinking (Source –> Location)

ln -s /source/foldername /folder/where/symlink/will/be

2 Responses to “Unix Commands”


  1. 1 Adrian Casillas August 14, 2010 at 10:50 pm

    Useful Commands would be REALLY useful if I could read them - near zero contrast - black on black.

    Nice cheat sheets!

    Cheers,
    Adrian

  2. 2 kevin December 31, 2011 at 6:36 pm

    Spot on with this write-up, I truly think this web site needs rather more consideration. I’ll in all probability be again to learn rather more, thanks for that info.

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