Useful Unix commands
One of the wonderful things about Unix is that there is a command to do just about anything you could ever conceive of doing. The tricky part is figuring out what the command is called and what switches it takes to do what you want. This page provides a primer on using some of the most important and useful commands to know.
Navigation
Before you do much of anything else you need to know where you are and how to get somewhere else. Here are some commands to help you get around.
- ls
- cd
- pwd
- whoami
Text munging
An overarching theme in the design of Unix is that everything is a stream of characters. Consequently there are a number of commands that allow you to manipulate character streams.
- grep
- pipe
- uniq
- wc
- sort
- cut
- paste
- sed
- awk