The Linux Wiki

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A (Basic) Linux Knowledge Bank

Welcome to The Linux Wiki, a generalist System Administrator resource focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux™ release 8, including derivatives of RHEL such as CentOS, Rocky and Alma Linux. It also provides some knowledge on HPC, and keeps learning notes on AWS and Raspberry Pi. Existing material on CentOS or RHEL EOL versions will not be maintained any more. This is always a "work in progress"!
Filesystem operations
cd → Change directory
chattr → Change file attributes on a Linux file system
chgrp → Change group ownership.
chmod → Change file mode bits
chown → Change file owner and group
cp → Copy files and directories
df → Report file system disk space usage
du → Estimate file space usage
find → Search for files in a directory hierarchy
ls → List directory contents
mkdir → Make directories
mv → Move (rename) files
pwd → Print name of current/working directory
rm → Remove files or directories
Operations on files
bzip2 → A block-sorting file compressor
cat → Concatenate files and print on the standard output
cmp → Compare two files byte by byte
comm → Compare two sorted files line by line
cut → Remove sections from each line of files
diff → Compare files line by line
fdupes → finds duplicate files in a given set of directories
file → Determine file type
grep → Print lines matching a pattern
gzip → The GNU data compression program
head → Output the first part of files
hexdump → Display file contents in ascii, decimal, hexadecimal, or octal
join → Join lines of two files on a common field
last → Output the last part of files
less → File perusal filter
more → File perusal filter
paste → Merge lines of files.
sed → Stream editor for filtering and transforming text
sort → Sort lines of text files
stat → Display file or file system status
strings → Print the strings of printable characters in files
tail → Output the last part of files
tar → Tape archiver
tee → read from standard input and write to standard output and files
tr → Translate or delete characters
wc → Print newline, word, and byte counts
xz → File compressor
Networking Tools
ethtool → Display or change ethernet card settings
hostname → Show or set the system's host name.
ifconfig → Configure a network interface
iftop → Display bandwidth usage on an interface by host
ip → Show / manipulate routing, devices, policy routing and tunnels
ncat → Concatenate and redirect sockets
netstat → Print network connections, routing tables, interface statistics,
masquerade connections, and multicast memberships
nmap → Network exploration tool and security / port scanner
ping → Send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to network hosts
ss → Another utility to investigate sockets
tcpdump → dump traffic on a network
traceroute → Print the route packets trace to network host
Processes toolset
atop → Advanced System & Process Monitor
htop → Interactive process viewer
kill → Signal / terminate a process
lsof → Lists open files
nice → Run a program with modified scheduling priority
ps → Report a snapshot of the current processes
pgrep / pkill → Look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes
pidof → Find the process ID of a running program
pstree → Display a tree of processes
renice → Alter priority of running processes
top → Display Linux processes
User Management
chage → Change user password expiry information
finger → User information lookup program
getent → Get entries from Name Service Switch libraries
groupadd → Add group
id → Print real and effective user and group IDs
passwd → Set password
su → Run a command with substitute user and group ID
sudo → Allows restricted root access for specified users
useradd → Add user
userdel → Delete user
usermod → Modify a user account
w → Show who is logged in and what are they doing
who → Show who is logged in
LAMP
HAProxy → TCP/HTTP proxy and load balancer
httpd → The Apache web server
PHP → PHP scripting language
MySQL → MySQL/MariaDB Database
nginx → HTTP and reverse proxy server
PostgreSQL → Postgres Database
HTML → Hypertext Markup Language
SSL → Secure Sockets Layer
Internet tools
curl → Transfer a URL
dig → DNS lookup utility
host → DNS lookup utility
links → Character mode WWW browser
nslookup → Query Internet name servers interactively
wget → The non-interactive network downloader
whois → Client for the whois directory service
Scripting and Programming
awk → A pattern scanning and processing language
perl → Practical Extraction and Report Language
bash PL → Bash (scripting)
Python → An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented
programming language
Shells
bash → GNU Bourne-Again SHell
zsh → Z shell
Version control
RCS → Revision Control System
git → Fast Version Control System
subversion → The subversion Version Control System
Hardware queries
inxi → Command line system information script for console and IRC
lscpu → Display information about the CPU architecture
lshw → List hardware
lspci → List all PCI devices
lsusb → List USB devices
lstopo → Show the topology of the system
Services management
chkconfig → Updates and queries runlevel information for system services (legacy)
service → Run a System V init script (legacy)
systemctl → Control the systemd system and service manager
Disk & filesystem stuff
LVM → LVM2 tools
NFS → Network File System
automount → Manage autofs mount points
exportfs → Maintain table of exported NFS file systems
fdisk → Manipulate disk partition table
gdisk → Manipulate disk partition table
mount → Mount a filesystem
parted → Partition Editor
Frequently used network clients
ftp → File Transfer Protocol
rsync → Remote (and local) file-copying tool
scp → Secure Copy
sftp → Secure file transfer program
ssh → Secure shell
telnet → User interface to the TELNET protocol
Frequently used utilities
expect → A program-script interaction and testing utility
man → An interface to the on-line reference manuals
multitail → Browse through several files at once
screen → Screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
script → Make typescript of terminal session
Package Management
dnf → Package Manager
rpm → RPM Package Manager
yum → Yellowdog Updater Modified
Configuration Management
ansible → ANSIBLE
cfengine → CFENGINE
saltstack → SALT

Knowledge Bank

Disclaimer

  • All the information here is presented without any warranty or guarantee of accuracy. Use it at your own risk. When in doubt, please consult the man pages or the GNU info pages as the authoritative references.
  • Some contents created starting 2024 are produced or enhanced by AI tools such as Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Claude.io, or you.com. Users are requested to check for validity of some AI contents.

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