Linux Common Commands

This page briefly documents common Linux commands. This is very personalized to my own experience and is not intended to replace any existting documentation (i.e. man or tldr). Rather, it can be thought of as a list of commands that I should be familiar with by memory.

cd

Changes the current directory to the given one.

Tip: Use cd - to go back to the previous directory.

clear

Clears the terminal screen and places the cursor at the top left.

info

An alternative to man, primarily used with GNU.

ls

Shows a list of files and directories.

Option	Description
-a	Includes hidden files
-l	Displays a long listing with detailed file infomration
-ld	Displays a long listing of a directory but hides its contents
-lh	Displays a long listing with file sizes in a human-friendly format
-lt	Lists all files sorted by date and time (newest first)
-ltr	Lists all files sorted by date and time (oldest first)
-R	Recursively lists contents of a directory

man

Shows the manual for a given command.

Tip: Use man -k to do a keyword search across available man pages.

pwd

Shows the current location in the directory tree.

tree

Lists a hierarchy of files and directories.

Option	Description
-a	Includes hidden files in the output
-d	Excludes files from the output
-h	Displays file sizes in human-friendly format
-f	Prints the full path for each file
-p	Includes file permissions in the output

tty

Shows the location of the current pseudo terminal session.

uname

Displays high-level information about the system environment.

Option	Description
-a	Show all details
-i	Show hardware platform
-m	Show hardware name
-o	Show OS name
-p	Show processor type
-r	Show kernel release
-s	Show kernel name
-v	Show kernel build date

uptime

Displays system's current time, length of time it has been up for, number of users currently logged in, and the average CPU load.

which

Displays the absolute path to the given command.