A short list of “must know” shell commands

Basic

pwd
cd; cd -; cd ..
ls; ls -lhrt
mkdir; mkdir -p
mv
cp; cp -a; scp
cat; zcat
less; zless
head; tail
wc -l
history
top; htop
chmod; chmod +x
tar xzvf; tar czvf; tar xjvf; tar cjvf

Intermediate

grep; grep -r; grep -n; grep -v
sort
uniq
find
tree
du -h
rsync; rsync -auzP

Advanced (yet commonly used!)

|
awk
sed

explainshell.com

This website can help you learn “fancy” shell command you see from others. Simply copy-paste to this web tool the shell command that you struggle to understand, and let it “explain” it for you. The tool will pull information from these shell commands documentation but organize it in a way most relevant to the command itself and display it in a format easy to navigate and learn all its components.

Contact

Gao Wang