Basic Linux commands

1. The date command

Linux maintains a system clock. As for now you can simply display the current date with the
date command, which shows the date and time for the nearest second as shown:
$ date
Thur Nov 4 11:23:52 IST 1999

The other format specifiers are as follows:

D Specifies the day of the month

Y Indicates the last two digits of the year
H Indicates the hour
M Indicates the minute
S Indicates the second
T Indicates the time in hh::mm:ss format

2. The who command

Linux maintains an account of all the current users of the system. A list of all the users is
displayed by the who command. The who command produces a three column output .This
indicates the number of users of the system with their login names in the first column. The
second column shows the device names of their respective terminals. The third column
indicates the date and time of logging in.
The –H option prints the column headers:
$ who –H

3. The tty command

Linux treats even terminals as files. It is therefore reasonable to expect a command which tells
you the device name of the terminal you are using with the help of the tty command.
$ tty
/dev/ttyp1
$

4. The cal command

This command is used for printing the calendar of any particular month or the entire year.Any
calendar from the year 1 to 9999 can be displayed with this command:
$ cal 2000

5. The man command

Linux systems maintain an online documentation about each command so that you can get to
know the complete description about a particular command. The command:
$ man
will give a description of the man command in general.
The man command is used to view the description of other commands. For this purpose the
man command is followed by the commandname. It has the following format:
$ man commandname

6. The finger utility

This utility is used to display the status of all the users currently logged on to the Linux system.
The finger utility without any parameter, displays a single line output for each user currently
logged on . It displays the information like the user’s login name, full name, terminal name,
write status, idle time, login time, the machine’s address where the user is currently logged in
and the office number. The write permission is displayed along with the terminal name as an
asterisk(*). If the asterisk appears after the terminal name, it means that the write permission is
denied. The syntax of the finger command is as follows:
finger [options] [user name]
 7. The chfn utility
The chfn (change your finger information) utility is used to change the user’s finger
information. The chfn utility checks for the user’s information from the /etc/passwd file and
allows the user to chane information. The syntax for this utility is as follows:
chfn [options] [username]
The chfn asks for the password of the user to authenticate the user for changing the
fingerinformation. If you do not want to change any particular information, you can press Enter
at the corresponding prompt and proceed with the remaining parameters.

8. The head command

The head command is used to display the top few records of the file. The syntax of the
command is as follows:
$ head [option] file
The option is as follows:
count Display the first count lines of file
The easiest way to use this command is to specify a filename without specifying the
number of lines to be displayed. If this is the case, the first ten records of the file are
displayed.
$ head tmp.lst
will display the first ten records of the file tmp.lst.

9. The tail command

The tail command displays the end few records of the file. If no line count is given, the tail
command displays the last ten lines of the file. We also have an option to specify a count and
select that many lines from the end of file.
Consider an example:
$ tail –3 emp.lst
 10. The mesg command
The user has the option to allow or disallow other users to write on his terminal. The two
options available with the mesg command are as follows:
mesg y
This option allows other users to write to your terminal
mesg n
This option disallows other users to write to your terminal
If you type the mesg command without any option, it displays the status of your terminal,say
for example,
$ mesg
is y

11. The wall command

The wall command is used to write to all the users. The wall command sends the message to all
the users who are currently logged on to the Linux system and have their mesg permission set
to ‘y’. The syntax of the command is as follows:
wall Type in the above command at the command prompt. Press <Enter>.
Now write the message you want to broadcast. Press Ctrl <d>. The message would be
broadcasted to all the users currently logged on.

Pipe Commands
If you have a series of commands in which the output of one command is the input of the next,
you can pipe the output without saving it in temporary files:
first_command | next_command
For example, if you wanted to print out a sorted version of a file that contained a list of names
and phone numbers, you could use a pipe (as well as input redirection):
sort < my_phone_list | lpr
Similarly, in order to display the contents of the current directory, a screen-full at a time,you
can give the following commands:
$ ls > myfile
$ more myfile
Here, the listing of the directory is stored in the file, myfile, by the first command and this file
is then used as input by the more command.
The above two steps can be combined and executed as a single command without
creating a temporary file,
$ ls | more
The vertical bar (|) is the pipe character which indicates to the shell that the output of the
command before the ‘|’ is the input to the command after the ‘|’.

Filters Command
A filter is a program that takes its input from the standard input file, processes ( or filters)it and
sends its output to the standard output file. Linux has a rich set of filters that can be used to
work on data in an efficient way. Some examples of filters are:
• cat
• grep
• tr
• sort
• uniq
• sed
• awk
Some of the filters are discussed as follows:

 The grep command

The grep command searches a file for a specified pattern and displays it on the screen. The
syntax of this command is as follows:
grep [options] regular expression filename[s]

 The tr command
The tr command transliterates characters i.e. it copies the standard input to the standard
output with substitution or deletion of specific characters. The command has the following
syntax:
tr [options] [string1] < file1
The following is the list of options:
c Complements the set of characters in string1 with respect to the universe of characters whose
ASCII codes are 001 through 377 octal
d Deletes characters specified in string1
s Squeezes all repeated occurrences of a character to one character

 The sort command

The sort command sorts lines of all the specified files together and writes the result on the
standard output.
The general syntax of the command is as follows:
sort [options][+pos1] [-pos2] filename[s]
Say for example the command
$sort myfile
will sort the file considering each record of a file as one single field.
  The uniq command
There is often a problem of duplicate entries due to faulty data entry. The sort command
suppresses them with the –u option. In addition to this there is a special tool to handle these
records called the uniq command. The command is most useful when placed in pipelines.

 The sed Command

The sed command provides a stream editor.
The syntax of the command is as follows:
sed [ -n ] Script [ File ... ]
sed [ -n ] [ -e Script ] ... [ -f ScriptFile ] ... [ File ... ]
The sed command modifies lines from the specified File parameter according to an edit script
and writes them to standard output. The sed command includes many features for selecting
lines to be modified and making changes only to the selected lines.

Alphabetical LINUX Command List:

1. addbib - create or extend a bibliographic database

2. apropos - locate commands by keyword lookup

3. ar - create library archives, and add or extract files
4. at - execute a command or script at a specified time
5. awk - pattern scanning and processing language
6. banner - display a string in large letters
7. basename - display portions of path names and filenames
8. batch - runs jobs when the system load level permits
9. biff - give notice of incoming mail messages
10. cal - display a calendar
11. calendar - a simple reminder service
12. cancel - cancel requests to a printer
13. cat - concatenate and display
14. cb - a simple C program beautifier
15. cc - C compiler
16. cd - change working directory
17. checknr - check nroff and troff input files; report possible errors
18. checkeq - checks documents formatted with memoranda macros
19. chgrp - change the group ownership of a file
20. chmod - change the permissions mode of a file
21. clear - clear the terminal screen
22. cmp - perform a byte-by-byte comparison of two files
23. colcrt - filter nroff output for a terminal without overstrike capability
24. comm - selects or rejects lines common to two sorted files
25. compress - compress files (see uncompress also)
26. cp - copy files
27. cpio - copy file archives in and out
28. cpp - the C language preprocessor
29. csh - a shell with a C-like syntax and advanced interactive features
30. ctags - create a tags file for use with ex and vi
31. cut - Writes selected bytes, characters, or fields from each line of a file.