The (often a bit geeky for this blog) FreeBSD-World website has a good “Top-25” list of 25 useful commands in Linux/UNIX for Beginners (note: new URL updated 31 Aug 2008)
I’m not sure that #24 (dig) and #25 (host) are absolutely necessary, #18 (startx) is possibly outdated these days, and the compression tools (6-9) are much of a muchness, but apart from that, #1 – #23 should be familiar to anyone who claims to be experienced with UNIX/Linux. If somebody was missing one, it would have to be #18 (startx), as (a) it’s not needed on servers, and (b) modern *nix distros will boot into a GUI automatically when possible.
So what’s the list?
25. host
24. dig
23. mkdir
22. rm
21. cp
20. grep
19. ls
18. startx
17. nano / vi
16. pwd
15. cat
14. man
13. kill
12. locate
11. ifconfig
10. ssh
9. gzip
8. bzip2
7. zip
6. tar (I would put 6-9 in one category, personally. rar should probably be in there too)
5. mount
4. passwd
3. ping
2. tail
1. top
thank you. I’ve been wandering around to find few command lines I need to learn as Linux newbie. This will save my time a lot
how is find missing in this list
s/locate/find
cheers!
-srini
Very good point! find is an awesome tool.
I’ve done a few posts which mention find, but I don’t think I’ve written about find itself.
I’d like to see sed, awk, tr and bc in there, also.
I classify host, dig, man, mount, passwd, as sysadmin tools, more than shell features.
I rarely / never used host, dig, startx, and locate. I’m familiar with the rest of them. Wow, you’re a mind reader, dude… Hehehe… 🙂
Anything related to *nix is just great.
Good work carry on.
Heh, startx outdated… maybe, but I hate it when (rarely as there is never need for reinstalling) I install a new distro on an emty clean partition and then it wont even ask, but makes it boot right into X – daamn, I’ll start my X windows when I feel like it 🙂
Good articles, btw…
any idea if it’s possible to emulate array variables with plain bourne shell? I know arrays work fine on /bin/sh that links to bash and was stunned when I tested the same script on SunOS and realized that there is no support for arrays on sh 😡
No, plain old Bourne can’t do it 😦
Bash is part of the Sun supported package set; it’s installed by default on Solaris 10, and part of the Extras CD for 8 and 9.
Alternatively, you could look at ksh; it supports arrays, and pdksh is normally available on Linux distros too
[…] is a great article on *nix Shell detailing 25 top most useful commands for Linux/UNIX […]
I would never put tar in the same class as the zip utilities. tar basically creates a simple text file, with human readable content, and does not necessarily compress. The zip utilities compress files and cannot be read without being unzipped.
I believe that zip can also create uncompressed files (zip -0), as tar can create compressed files (tar czf). Using gzip compression with a tar file generally creates a smaller tarball than zip with LZW compression.
http://www.bsdworld.net/story.php?id=15
new location
Thanks; link updated.