by Oliver; 2014
8. Gently Wading In - The Top 10 Indispensable Unix Commands
Now that we've dipped one toe into the water, let's make a list of the 10 most important unix commands in the universe:
- pwd
- ls
- cd
- mkdir
- echo
- cat
- cp
- mv
- rm
- man
Every command has a help or
manual page, which can be summoned by typing
man.
To see more information about
pwd, for example, we enter:
$ man pwd
But
pwd isn't particularly interesting and its man page is barely worth reading.
A better example is afforded by one of the most fundamental commands of all,
ls, which lists the contents of the
cwd or of whatever directories we give it as arguments:
$ man ls
The man pages tend to give TMI (too much information) but the most important point is that commands have
flags which usually come in a
one-dash-one-letter or
two-dashes-one-word flavor:
command -f
command --flag
and the docs will tell us what each option does.
You can even try:
$ man man
However, as the old unix joke goes, this won't work:
$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
Below we'll discuss the commands in the top 10 list in more depth.
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