This is really good. Clear and well laid out.
The only thing that might confuse some beginners is your specific choice of package manager.
This is really good. Clear and well laid out.
The only thing that might confuse some beginners is your specific choice of package manager.
I added more information to the installing software section, updated section title to specify Arch Linux, and added another section for Debian and Derivatives.
You're awesome.
Interesting compilation, there is cheat.sh, tldr and others though
I made this just as much for me as I did for others. Writing things down myself really helps me memorize them.
Nice work.
My tiny nitpick is that "touch" will create the file you specify if it doesn't exist. I've seen this usage a lot, so your example may benefit from mentioning it.
TIL „touch“ has other uses than creating a file
Thanks for all the feedback! I'm much happier with it now, and I'll probably continue to make small changes over time.
I find the references to file extension kinda confusing. Extensions mean a lot less in Linux cli, but I can tell youre just using them for examples. Maybe give more concrete examples instead.
ls *.sh
to list all the files ending in .sh
I updated various examples, and replaced with in most places and removed it from the legend.
I don't know how this would be useful to someone reading the cheat sheet, but here's something interesting I just indirectly found out while skimming it through:
Ctrl+D
does the same thing as ENTER
, except the latter additionally sends the end-of-line character to the reader while the former sends nothing;
as is the case for shells or interactive programs like the Python REPL, Ctrl+D
causes them to terminate only because it sends a string that is 0 characters long, and 0-size reads are universally interpreted as files reaching the end.
To test this: enter cat
, type "hello" without pressing enter, then Ctrl+D
: you should see "hellohello".
An extremely rare case of this being useful would be using netcat to send a string somewhere, without sending the end-of-line byte at the end.
I updated "Log out" to "Exit (sends a signal indicating the end of a text stream)". Which I think is a lot more accurate, and still easy to understand.
Oh. My. Gosh. I love this. Thank you. And thank you for being --verbose
about the provenance and history of the document. And big big thank yous for the Internet Archive links. Bravo.
Cool, thank you!
What do you mean about "/ root directory, eg /usr/bin/bash"? / is /, just the top-most directory
I added more detail to the description and made a more relevant example. (I think)
Yes, the top most directory, /, is the root directory.
Each directory is a branch in one giant tree structure. For example, if you have a directory containing two other directories, that is a branch that is splitting into two branches. All directories are descendants of the same root.
would you upload this on github?
Done? I've never uploaded to GitHub before, and I was just doing what I thought I should do. I'll do my best to keep it updated with the version on my website.
https://github.com/ordinarybyte/linux_cheat_sheet
Is there a way to make GitHub automatically detect changes to the file at cerium.cc and update the repo? Or do they not allow that? I know a scheduled script would be able to work but I don't really want to have to run it myself.
You can do some automation with GitHub Actions, but I have no idea if it can do specifically that
Usually you would go the other way around. Merge changes into git and then distribute from there.
cd -
changes to the previous directory
Does cd +
work to go forward after using cd -
?
cd -
negates cd -
, so you're right back where you started! It's like multiplying 2 negatives.
You might consider putting a license on it
I've been using Linux for decades and I bet that'll still come in handy.
This is fantastic. Just at a glance I already learned something new! Definitely keeping this for reference.
^S - stop terminal IO
^Q - resume terminal IO (if your terminal looks frozen, this is the one to try)
alt-b, alt-f - jump back/forward one word
You're a prince among men.
And an Albert among princes.
Aren't Alt + Backspace
, and Alt + Arrow Key Left/Right
also terminal shortcuts?
I like your version, I am bookmarking it.
This is really nice!
This is really helpful, thank you.
Really cool!
Another good addition to this might be some script rudiments, like how to write and run simple .sh
files
Awesome! Thank you kindly
Great idea. I'll keep this handy from now on.
At the end, in redirection, <<
: that's not how here-documents work. The example gives the impression it will read the given file up until "STOP", but in reality the shell expects you to keep writing your here-doc until you write "STOP" and then feeds it to the program as if it were all on stdin. I don't think wc even does anything with the stdin if you give it a filename...
Note that variable expansion will happen in here-docs, so it's a bit different than a simple cat
.
Also look into here-strings. And process substitution, I find that quite handy.
A little over a decade & a half and I find that very useful. Should have GPG in for reading signatures on software and such too. If you'd like I can contribute to GPG terminal as I've been using it for a good portion of that time.
I've needed something like this for a while, thank you buddy
I owe you bigly
Alt + .
inserts the last argument from the last command run into the current line. I find it helpful all the time.
less
can be invoked directly, without having to be piped from cat
: less <file>
is mostly equivalent to cat <file> | less
I have considered making an alias/function that automatically determines if the file is longer than the terminal, using something like wc -l
and stty -a | grep -oP "rows \d"
and then either uses cat
or less
depending on that... but I already use sharkdp's bat
, which has that baked in as well as many other conveniences
Don't forget tail -f <file>
which is kind of like watch tail <file>
If you're going to have du
, I would also have a section for df
, I use the latter more often (but probably because I have like 5 mounts for my OS). Using them in combination is basically what all the gui disk usage analyzers do; something like df -h
"oh, /var
's almost full" (as previously mentioned, I have different folders on different partitions), then du -ah /var
and so on to find problem areas
The "installing from source" section works maybe 50% of the time. It assumes a configure
script, which isn't always the case. I've had a lot of source that comes bundled the way a .deb
does: basically a compressed filesystem that assumes the $CWD
is /
(basically, if you uncompressed it in /
, all the files would go where they needed to be). Sometimes they use language-specific build systems, so you might need go and rust and... Maybe it's best to just keep it your way and look up the rest, but do keep in mind the thing I said about compressed filesystems
find
is great if you want to reindex everything from square 0; or if you only need to do small directory/tree. If you have the extra space to spare, install locate
: it indexes the files beforehand (as a cron job) and yields results more quickly for searches that span entire filesystems; the only downside is that you have to manually reindex (sudo updatedb
) to locate files installed the same day
In the Extracting, Sorting, and Filtering Data
section, you might consider adding in sort -u
and uniq
which fill their own (overlapping) niches. sed
and awk
may be a bit more than beginner, but they are endlessly helpful. tr
can be a useful shorthand for when cut
and sed
don't quite cut
it, but you don't want to build a full in-line awk
script.
Finally:
<command> 2>&1 <file> | Output and errors from <command> are redirected and appended to <file>
Should read "Output and errors from are redirected to " because the single >
overwrites the existing file, as opposed to >>
which, as you noted, appends to the end of the file
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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