Basic Linux Command Lines For Newbies!

If you are a starter in Linux, you might find it a little difficult to understand which command line to use for which function. So here we bring to you command line examples of some much used commands, which will be good enough to give you a kickstart in Linux!

1. tar command examples

Create a new tar archive.

$ tar cvf archive_name.tar dirname/

Extract from an existing tar archive.

$ tar xvf archive_name.tar

View an existing tar archive.

$ tar tvf archive_name.tar

2. grep command examples

Search for a given string in a file (case in-sensitive search).

$ grep -i "the" demo_file

Print the matched line, along with the 3 lines after it.

$ grep -A 3 -i "example" demo_text

Search for a given string in all files recursively

$ grep -r "atithya" *

3. find command examples

Find files using file-name ( case in-sensitve find)

# find -iname "MyCProgram.c"

Execute commands on files found by the find command

$ find -iname "MyCProgram.c" -exec md5sum {} \;

Find all empty files in home directory

# find ~ -empty

4. ssh command examples

Login to remote host

ssh -l jsmith remotehost.example.com

Debug ssh client

ssh -v -l jsmith remotehost.example.com

Display ssh client version

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_3.9p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7a Feb 19 2003

5. sed command examples

When you copy a DOS file to Unix, you could find \r\n in the end of each line. This example converts the DOS file format to Unix file format using sed command.

$sed 's/.$//' filename

Print file content in reverse order

$ sed -n '1!G;h;$p' thegeekstuff.txt

Add line number for all non-empty-lines in a file

$ sed '/./=' thegeekstuff.txt | sed 'N; s/\n/ /'

6. awk command examples

Remove duplicate lines using awk

$ awk '!($0 in array) { array[$0]; print }' temp

Print all lines from /etc/passwd that has the same uid and gid

$awk -F ':' '$3==$4' passwd.txt

Print only specific field from a file.

$ awk '{print $2,$5;}' employee.txt

7. Sort command examples

Sort a file in ascending order

$ sort names.txt

Sort a file in descending order

$ sort -r names.txt

Sort passwd file by 3rd field.

$ sort -t: -k 3n /etc/passwd | more

8. export command examples

To view oracle related environment variables.

$ export | grep ORACLE
declare -x ORACLE_BASE="/u01/app/oracle"
declare -x ORACLE_HOME="/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0"
declare -x ORACLE_SID="med"
declare -x ORACLE_TERM="xterm"

To export an environment variable:

$ export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0

9. xargs command examples

Copy all images to external hard-drive

# ls *.jpg | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /external-hard-drive/directory

Search all jpg images in the system and archive it.

# find / -name *.jpg -type f -print | xargs tar -cvzf images.tar.gz

Download all the URLs mentioned in the url-list.txt file

# cat url-list.txt | xargs wget –c

10. ls command examples

Display filesize in human readable format (e.g. KB, MB etc.,)

$ ls -lh
-rw-r----- 1 atithya team-dev 8.9M Jun 12 15:27 arch-linux.txt.gz

Order Files Based on Last Modified Time (In Reverse Order) Using ls -ltr

$ ls -ltr

Visual Classification of Files With Special Characters Using ls -F

$ ls -F

11. pwd command

pwd is Print working directory. What else can be said about the good old pwd who has been printing the current directory name for ages.

12. cd command examples

Use “cd -” to toggle between the last two directories

Use “shopt -s cdspell” to automatically correct mistyped directory names on cd

13. gzip command examples

To create a *.gz compressed file:

$ gzip test.txt

To uncompress a *.gz file:

$ gzip -d test.txt.gz


Display compression ratio of the compressed file using gzip -l

$ gzip -l *.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
              23709               97975  75.8% asp-patch-rpms.txt
14. bzip2 command examples

To create a *.bz2 compressed file:

$ bzip2 test.txt
To uncompress a *.bz2 file:

bzip2 -d test.txt.bz2
15. unzip command examples

To extract a *.zip compressed file:

$ unzip test.zip
View the contents of *.zip file (Without unzipping it):

$ unzip -l jasper.zip
Archive:  jasper.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
    40995  11-30-98 23:50   META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
    32169  08-25-98 21:07   classes_
    15964  08-25-98 21:07   classes_names
    10542  08-25-98 21:07   classes_ncomp
16. shutdown command examples

Shutdown the system and turn the power off immediately.

# shutdown -h now
Shutdown the system after 10 minutes.

# shutdown -h +10
Reboot the system using shutdown command.

# shutdown -r now
Force the filesystem check during reboot.

# shutdown -Fr now
16. ftp command examples

Both ftp and secure ftp (sftp) has similar commands. To connect to a remote server and download multiple files, do the following.

$ ftp IP/hostname
ftp> mget *.html
To view the file names located on the remote server before downloading, mls ftp command as shown below.

ftp> mls *.html -
/ftptest/features.html
/ftptest/index.html
/ftptest/othertools.html
/ftptest/samplereport.html
/ftptest/usage.html
17. ps command examples

ps command is used to display information about the processes that are running in the system.

While there are lot of arguments that could be passed to a ps command, following are some of the common ones.

To view current running processes.

$ ps -ef | more
To view current running processes in a tree structure. H option stands for process hierarchy.

$ ps -efH | more