What are your favourite & most useful *nix COMMANDs ? [Post them here]

piratePenguin · 12-09-2005, 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trickykid

A simple cd .. also takes you back to the previous directory..

'cd ..' takes you to the parent directory.

Code:

piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~$ cd stuff
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff$ cd crap/
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff/crap$ cd ..
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff$ cd -
/home/piratepenguin/stuff/crap
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff/crap$

Code:

piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~$ cd stuff
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff$ cd crap/
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff/crap$ cd ..
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~/stuff$ cd ..
piratepenguin@pcdeclan:~$

There's the difference.
EDIT: I posted that before I read phil.d.g's reply, which says basically the same thing.

'man', 'info' (for reading GNU manuals. Try 'info info'), and 'grep', are my favourite commands.

eviltama · 01-01-2006, 08:56 PM

My favs:
df -h
shows you your hdd volumes in a language humans can understand!

ls -alc
lists everything, sym links, hidden files etc

sudo nano <filename>
to edit files that root owns

and the coolest commands EVER... how to untar an entire directory full of files...

.tar: for i in `ls *.tar`; do tar xvf $i; done

.tar.gz: for i in `ls *.tar.gz`; do tar xvfz $i; done

.tar.bz2: for i in `ls *.tar.bz2`; do tar xvfj $i; done

slantoflight · 01-02-2006, 01:20 AM

startx

Well to be fair, its not an actual nix command, its a script. But it still gets the job done.

muddywaters · 01-02-2006, 07:22 PM

undo
as in
$ rm -r wifes_xmas_album
$ undo
Doesn't exist afaik but it would be nice

equinox · 01-03-2006, 01:12 AM

I found pipes and xargs very usefull.

i.e

pidof irssi | xargs kill -9

CrashedAgain · 01-03-2006, 10:00 AM

Most used command: sudo su
Other useful commands: df and du -s <directory>
Favorite command: apt-get install <package> ...it's what makes Debian #1. Yast, Yum, Rpm, Rpmdrake & all the others aren't even close.

vasudevadas · 01-03-2006, 11:17 AM

They are all great, at their own particular tasks. My favourite command for filtering streams is "grep." My favourite command for editing streams is "sed." My favourite command for finding files is "find." You get the picture.