I’ve been making changes everywhere around UnixTutorial.org and want to take this opportunity to both share the news and gain your feedback. Please take a moment to leave a comment or reach out on Twitter or Facebook.

Unix Reference

I’m adding new sections to the Unix Tutorial Reference section, these are going to be the pillars of how-tos and tutorials on this blog. Some are active and linked, others will be updated in this post as I publish them.

• tmux – and everything I know and like about it
• SSH – this will cover both SSH client setup and SSH server configuration
• GRUB bootloader – it’s getting great improvements lately and still stays as the default boot loader in majority of Linux distros
• sudo – basics and advanced techniques for privilege escalation
  Linux kernel – what it is, how it works and how you can use it effectively
  Docker – basics description and common operations
  tmux – why and how you should use tmux for better productivity
  SELinux – securing Red Hat based distributions
  AWS – getting started with AWS cloud
  OpenStack – how to setup and use your own (on-prem) cloud solution

Unix Commands

The original Basic Unix Commands and Unix Commands sections are some of the most popular sections, and that’s even before I launch another way of documenting all of them (stay tuned!).

But because I’ve recently started blogging increasingly more about hobbies and Unix Tutorial projects, I think I’ll be covering more of the OS distro specific commands in the next few years.

Specifically, there following are being added:

• Linux Commands – mostly suited to a desktop Linux user right now, but will gain server grade commands soon
• macOS Commands – it’s rare that one needs to use a macOS specific command or launch a graphics application using terminal shell. But that’s exactly why I think it’s important to know how to do this and to learn some of the great commands macOS has to offer

Similar to the Unix Reference section, I think the Unix Commands area will eventually include Docker commands, AWS commands and OpenStack commands as well. I know, they regularly get collapsed into a single mighty command with lots of options instead of continue as individual commands, but we’ll see.

Am I missing something important? Are you learning or using other commands that would justify a separate section on a website like mine? Please let me know and I’ll be glad to research and document things for all of us.

See Also

• Unix Commands
• Basic Unix Commands
• Linux Commands
• macOS Commands

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
  • pwd
  • cd
  • df -h
• check files and directories
  • ls -l
  • cat
  • less and more
• manage files and directories
  • mkdir
  • touch
  • chown
  • chmod
  • cp
  • mv
  • vim
• remote access
  • ssh
  • scp

See Also

• Basic Unix Commands
• Unix Commands