Sixty or so general Linux commands
(and other things)

The commands listed below are most of the ones you will need. You should become familiar with them and their main options as soon as you can.

Informational commands

man

help for command

ls

list directory

help

like man, for bash

du

display disk usage

uname

show system

df

display file systems

ps

list processes

jobs

list background jobs

date

show date and time

find

find files

umask

show/set permission mask

top

show tasks in real-time

File editing commands

vi

visual editor

sed

stream editor

tr

translate characters

cut

cut from line

File and Directory manipulation commands

cp

copy files or directories

mv

move or rename

rm

remove file

cd

change directory

mkdir

make directory

pwd

print working directory

rmdir

remove directory

chmod

change permissions

rm -rf

CAREFUL: remove all

chown

change owner (and group)

ln

create hard link

ln -s

create soft link

tar

create archive

gzip

compress file

File and Filter commands

cat

catenate (list) file

grep

search for reg exp

head

list head of file

tail

list tail of file

less

list file in pages

more

ancestor of less

touch

change file access date

wc

word count

sort

sort text file

echo

display text

Input/Output (re)direction (and stuff)

<

redirect file to stdin

script

capture output to file

>

redirect stdout to file

printf

formatted echo (print)

2>

redirect stderr to file

<< XXXX

read from kb to XXXX

>>

append stdout to file

|

pipe stdout to stdin

2>>

append stderr to file

&>

redirect stdout + stderr

Miscellaneous commands (and things)

^C

kill -2 current process

kill

send signal to process

^D

indicate kb end-of-file

exit

leave current shell

^Z

send to background

set

set a variable

.bashrc

start-up script filename

/root

root's home directory

alias

create command alias

PATH

search path variable

su

switch user

sudo

Switch user for 1 command