Linux Utilities

 

When Linus Torvalds introduced Linux and for a long time thereafter, Linux did not have a graphical user interface (GUI): It ran on character-based terminals only. All the tools ran from a command line.

One of the important advantages of Linux is that it comes with thousands of utilities
that perform myriad functions.

----------File system utilities ----------

ls     -list

mkdir     -make directory
touch    

cp          -copy

mv         -move

rm          -remove

cat         -catenate
less   
more
head
tail

grep      -g/re/p. In this command g stands for global, re is a regular expression delimited by slashes, and p means print.
sort
uniq      -unique
diff        -difference

lpr         -line printer

file

slocate

----------Compressing and Archiving ----------

bzip2
bunzip2
bzcat
bzip2recover

gzip
gunzip
zcat

tar

zip
unzip

----------Locating utilities ----------

which        -find utility in search path
whereis     -searches for files related to a utility by looking in standard locations instead of using your search path
whatis      -finds only complete word matches for the name of the utility
apropos    -searches for the keyword in the short description line (the top line) of all man pages and displays those that contain a match

man -k

----------Transform ----------

unix2dos
dos2unit

----------system and user ----------

hostname
date

w
who
who am i
finger

script     -records a shell session

echo      -displays text

----------communicating with other users ----------

write
mesg