Seems the Basic Unix Commands section is gaining popularity online – that's great to see, means I'm putting focus where it's actually needed. Today I want to share my view of the most useful basic unix commands – the ones that I use daily.
What Defines a List of Daily Used Commands
The types of commands you will need depends on the tasks and how you go about them. Chances are, most of your work is done remotely – which means one of your most used commands could be git or ssh.
Apart from this, it's unbelievably awesome how the majority of daily work can be accomplished using very basic unix commands, nothing fancy at all.
If you're a software developer, you'll probably have your share of programming language interpreters and compilers along with other components of a DevOps toolchain, but even with them in the picture there's still quite a chunk of work done using the most beatifully simple commands like cd and ls.
Daily Tasks I Accomplish with Command Line
Here's the list of things I get to do pretty much every day:
- navigate around filesystems
- where am I?
- go to a specific directory
- is this the same or separate filesystem?
- check how much space is there available?
- check files and directories
- is there a file named such-and-such?
- what's the size of the file?
- who owns the file (username and group)
- when was the file last updated?
- what's the contents of this file?
- manage files and directories
- create a new directory
- create or edit a file
- change username or group ownership
- remove a directory or a file
- copy or move a file
- remote access
- connect to a remote server
- copy file from my system to remote server
- transfer files from remote server to my local system
Basic Unix Commands For Daily Use
I'll probably show examples of command lines for these tasks in some future post, but for now will just map the basic commands to each section:
- navigate around filesystems
- check files and directories
- manage files and directories
- remote access
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