I find it horribly saddening that people are falling away from the command line. I personally use most of these commands multiple times a day. To think that these are the ones that people don’t use…

I almost find this article’s title offensive. I too use most of these commands daily because my job requires I be efficient. Put it this way, its much easier to click on the wrong icon then it is to type the wrong program name. How often do you type “firefox” when you really wanted to type “xterm”?

In all fairness, I don’t see how you can categorize any of these as really being “Linux” commands. Hell, most aren’t really OS commands, per se.

The only ones that are really OS commands would be the pgrep, mkdir and touch. Of those, the only one that’s even remotely specifically a Linux command is `pgrep`. Even that’s kind of a stretch, as several other *N*X’s have a pgrep implementation. Every *N*X implements mkdir and touch in the ways described above.

The rest are “shell built-ins” - specifically, Bash. If you’re one of the (admittedly rare) users that changes their shell, your “Linux commands” likely won’t work (e.g., if someone installs and uses pdksh). While Bash was initially unique to Linux, the functionalities that you’re describing are functionalities that Bash borrowed from other shells (e.g., Tenex C-Shell). So, again: not really “Linux commands”.

One cool one I recently learned is fc, fc will open the last command from your shell history in the default editor. You can also specify a text editor. You can add a history line number or the first few letters of the most recent command. For example “fc -e kate wget” will open kate with the last shell command starting with wget. You can edit the command, and when you save and close kate, the command will execute.

The !! command is very useful when you forget to start a commando with “sudo” in Ubuntu:

apt-get update
sudo !!

And yes, it looks like you are shouting: “I MEANT TO USE SUDO!”

The one command *nix DOESN’T have but NEEDS:

#!/bin/ksh
mkdir “$1″
cd “$1″

Save the above as an executable script (I call mine mkcd) and use it:

$ mkcd dir

Stupid, you say? I thought so, and now I get ticked whenever I’m on someone else’s system that DOESN’T have it. How many times to you end up having to make a directory and then immediately cd into it? Quite a few, if you’re like me. I know the above doesn’t have any error checking, but it’s for my own use. I have a similar script that acts like mv, only it makes a directory, moves the file into it, and then cds you into that directory.

If there are other ways of doing these things, I’m open to ideas…….

I think it’s “cd -” not “cd” that is written in the 10 commands…

Here’s a little-known but extremely useful one:

Sometimes your terminal gets borked, for whatever reason. It gets put into a different display mode, it stops printing typed characters, it won’t display line feeds, etc. Instead of killing and re-starting your terminal session, you can merely type the command ‘reset’. This will reset your terminal back to its defaults, clear the screen, and everything will be as it was before.

I cant say i never used all these command.
i might not use everyone every day, but it almost pisses me off all these elitist users who have to post to this blog and point out that it is a useless post because _they_ know everything about these commands so everyone else should know them. have you ever stopped to think about that the linux platform gathers new users every day, and that these users need sources to learn things?

cheers

ctrl+l will clear the screen.

Actually, I never knew most of these tips, I use CLI often… thx bud

You can save and exit vi by …. easier than shift+w+w

What about the built in ps and grep? Surely it’s better to know how to use grep with other commands… ps -ax |grep fox