Basic Linux Commands

BASIC LINUX COMMANDS

All Basic Commands of Linux are given.

ls command

The ls command is used to view the contents of a directory.By default,this command will display the contents of your current workink directory .If you want to see the content of other directories, type ls and then the directory's path.For example, enter ls/home/username/Documents to view the content of Documents.

top command

top command is used to show the Linux processes. It provides a dynamic real-time view of the running system. Usually, this command shows the summary information of the system and the list of processes or threads which are currently managed by the Linux Kernel. As soon as you will run this command it will open an interactive command mode where the top half portion will contain the statistics of processes and resource usage. And Lower half contains a list of the currently running processes.

mkdir command

Use the mkdir command when you need to create a folder or a directory. For example, if you want to make a directory called “DIY”, then you can type “mkdir DIY”. Remember, as told before, if you want to create a directory named “DIY Hacking”, then you can type “mkdir DIY\ Hacking”.

rm command

Use the rm command to delete files and directories. Use "rm -r" to delete just the directory. It deletes both the folder and the files it contains when using only the rm command.

rmdir_com

Use rmdir to delete a directory. But rmdir can only be used to delete an empty directory. To delete a directory containing files, use rm.

chmod command

Use chmod to make a file executable and to change the permissions granted to it in Linux. Imagine you have a python code named numbers.py in your computer. You'll need to run “python numbers.py” every time you need to run it. Instead of that, when you make it executable, you'll just need to run “numbers.py” in the terminal to run the file. To make a file executable, you can use the command “chmod +x numbers.py” in this case. You can use “chmod 755 numbers.py” to give it root permissions or “sudo chmod +x numbers.py” for root executable. Here is some more information about the chmod command.

cp command

Use the cp command to copy files through the command line. It takes two arguments: The first is the location of the file to be copied, the second is where to copy.

cd command

Use the "cd" command to go to a directory. For example, if you are in the home folder, and you want to go to the downloads folder, then you can type in “cd Downloads”. Remember, this command is case sensitive, and you have to type in the name of the folder exactly as it is. But there is a problem with these commands. Imagine you have a folder named “Raspberry Pi”. In this case, when you type in “cd Raspberry Pi”, the shell will take the second argument of the command as a different one, so you will get an error saying that the directory does not exist. Here, you can use a backward slash. That is, you can use “cd Raspberry\ Pi” in this case. Spaces are denoted like this: If you just type “cd” and press enter, it takes you to the home directory. To go back from a folder to the folder before that, you can type “cd ..” . The two dots represent back.

pwd command

When you first open the terminal, you are in the home directory of your user. To know which directory you are in, you can use the “pwd” command. It gives us the absolute path, which means the path that starts from the root. The root is the base of the Linux file system. It is denoted by a forward slash( / ). The user directory is usually something like "/home/username".

cat command

Use the cat command to display the contents of a file. It is usually used to easily view programs.

mv command

Use the mv command to move files through the command line. We can also use the mv command to rename a file. For example, if we want to rename the file “text” to “new”, we can use “mv text new”. It takes the two arguments, just like the cp command.

find command

The find command offers the most powerful and precise features to surface whatever you're looking for in Linux .All modern Linux distributions support the find command from the shell.

du command

Use du to know the disk usage of a file in your system. If you want to know the disk usage for a particular folder or file in Linux, you can type in the command df and the name of the folder or file. For example, if you want to know the disk space used by the documents folder in Linux, you can use the command “du Documents”. You can also use the command “ls -lah” to view the file sizes of all the files in a folder.

kill command

kill commad is a built-in command which is used to terminate processes manually. kill command sends a signal to a process which terminates the process. If the user doesn’t specify any signal which is to be sent along with kill command then default TERM signal is sent that terminates the process.

chown command

Linux chown command Linux chown command is used to change a file's ownership, directory, or symbolic link for a user or group. The chown stands for change owner.

tar command

Use tar to work with tarballs (or files compressed in a tarball archive) in the Linux command line. It has a long list of uses. It can be used to compress and uncompress different types of tar archives like .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2,etc. It works on the basis of the arguments given to it. For example, "tar -cvf" for creating a .tar archive, -xvf to untar a tar archive, -tvf to list the contents of the archive, etc