60 Commands of Linux : A Guide from Newbies to System Administrator

For a person new to Linux, finding Linux functional is still not very easy even after the emergence of user friendly Linux distribution like Ubuntu and Mint. The thing remains that there will always be some configuration on user’s part to be done manually.

Just to start with, the first thing a user should know is the basic commands in terminal. Linux GUI runs on Shell. When GUI is not running but Shell is running, Linux is running. If Shell is not running, nothing is running. Commands in Linux is a means of interaction with Shell. For a beginners some of the basic computational task is to:

1. View the contents of a directory : A directory may contains visible and invisible files with different file permissions.
2. Viewing blocks, HDD partition, External HDD
3. Checking the integrity of Downloaded/Transferred Packages
4. Converting and copying a file
5. Know your machine name, OS and Kernel
6. Viewing history
7. Being root
8. Make Directory
9. Make Files
10. Changing the file permission
11. Own a file
12. Install, Update and maintain Packages
13. Uncompressing a file
14. See current date, time and calendar
15. Print contents of a file
16. Copy and Move
17. See the working directory for easy navigation
18. Change the working directory, etc…

And we have described all of the above basic computational task in our First Article.

This was the first article of this series. We tried to provide you with detailed description of these commands with explicit examples which was highly appreciated by our reader in terms of likes, comments and traffic.

What after these initial commands? Obviously we moved to the next part of this article where we provided commands for computational tasks like:

1. Finding a file in a given directory
2. Searching a file with the given keywords
3. Finding online documentation
4. See the current running processes
5. Kill a running process
6. See the location of installed Binaries
7. Starting, Ending, Restarting a service
8. Making and removing of aliases
9. View the disk and space usages
10. Removing a file and/or directory
11. Print/echo a custom output on standard output
12. Changing password of on-self and other’s, if you are root.
13. View Printing queue
14. Compare two files
15. Download a file, the Linux way (wget)
16. Mount a block / partition / external HDD
17. Compile and Run a code written in ‘C’, ‘C++’ and ‘Java’ Programming Language

This Second Article was again highly appreciated by the readers of Tecmint.com. The article was nicely elaborated with suitable examples and output.

After providing the users with the glimpse of Commands used by a Middle Level User we thought to give our effort in a nice write-up for a list of command used by an user of System Administrator Level.

In our Third and last article of this series, we tried to cover the commands that would be required for the computational task like:

1. Configuring Network Interface
2. Viewing custom Network Related information
3. Getting information about Internet Server with customisable switches and Results
4. Digging DNS
5. Knowing Your System uptime
6. Sending an occasional Information to all other logged-in users
7. Send text messages directly to a user
8. Combination of commands
9. Renaming a file
10. Seeing the processes of a CPU
11. Creating newly formatted ext4 partition
12. Text File editors like vi, emacs and nano
13. Copying a large file/folder with progress bar
14. Keeping track of free and available memory
15. Backup a mysql database
16. Make difficult to guess – random password
17. Merge two text files
18. List of all the opened files

Writing this article and the list of command that needs to go with the article was a little cumbersome. We chose 20 commands with each article and hence gave a lot of thought for which command should be included and which should be excluded from the particular post. I personally selected the commands on the basis of their usability (as I use and get used to) from an user point of view and an Administrator point of view.

This Articles aims to concatenate all the articles of its series and provide you with all the functionality in commands you can perform in our this very series of articles.

There are too long lists of commands available in Linux. But we provided the list of 60 commands which is generally and most commonly used and a user having knowledge of these 60 commands as a whole can work in terminal very much smoothly.

That’s all for now from me. I will soon be coming up with another tutorial, you people will love to go through. Till then Stay Tuned! Keep Visiting Tecmint.com.

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