15 Linux Terminal Commands That

Will Rock Your World

by Gary Newell
Updated March 15, 2017

I have been using Linux for about 10 years and what I am going to show you in this
article is a list of Linux commands, tools, clever little tricks and some plain fun
commands that I wish somebody had shown me from the outset instead of
stumbling upon them as I went along.

01 Useful Command Line Keyboard Shortcuts

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The following keyboard shortcuts

are incredibly useful and will save
you loads of time:

CTRL + U - Cuts text up until the

cursor.

CTRL + K - Cuts text from the

cursor until the end of the line

CTRL + Y - Pastes text

CTRL + E - Move cursor to end of line

CTRL + A - Move cursor to the beginning of the line

ALT + F - Jump forward to next space

ALT + B - Skip back to previous space

ALT + Backspace - Delete the previous word

CTRL + W - Cut word behind cursor

Shift + Insert - Pastes text into terminal

Just so that the commands above make sense look at the next line of text.

sudo apt-get install programname

As you can see I have a spelling error and for the command to work I would need to
change "intall" to "install".

Imagine the cursor is at the end of the line. There are various ways to get back to
the word install to change it.

I could press ALT + B twice which would put the cursor in the following position
(denoted by the ^ symbol):

sudo apt-get^intall programname

Now you could press the cursor key and insert the ''s' into install.

Another useful command is "shift + insert" especially If you need to copy text from a
browser into the terminal.

02 SUDO !!
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You are going to really thank me for

the next command if you don't
already know it because until you
know this exists you curse yourself
every time you enter a command
and the words "permission denied"
appear.

sudo !!

How do you use sudo !!? Simply. Imagine you have entered the following
command:

apt-get install ranger

The words "Permission denied" will appear unless you are logged in with elevated
privileges.

sudo !! runs the previous command as sudo. So the previous command now
becomes:

sudo apt-get install ranger

If you don't know what sudo is, start here.

03 Pausing Commands And Running

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Commands In The Background
I have already written a guide
showing how to run terminal
commands in the background.

CTRL + Z - Pauses an
application

fg - Returns you to the

application

So what is this tip about?

Imagine you have opened a file in nano as follows:

sudo nano abc.txt

Halfway through typing text into the file, you realize that you quickly want to type
another command into the terminal but you can't because you opened nano in
foreground mode.

You may think your only option is to save the file, exit nano, run the command and
then re-open nano.

All you have to do is press CTRL + Z and the foreground application will pause and
you will be returned to the command line. You can then run any command you like
and when you have finished return to your previously paused session by entering
"fg" into the terminal window and pressing return.

An interesting thing to try out is to open a file in nano, enter some text and pause
the session. Now open another file in nano, enter some text and pause the session.
If you now enter "fg" you return to the second file you opened in nano. If you exit
nano and enter "fg" again you return to the first file you opened within nano.

04 Use nohup To Run Commands After You

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Log Out Of An SSH Session
The nohup command is really
useful if you use the ssh command
 to log onto other machines.

So what does nohup do?

Imagine you are logged on to

another computer remotely using
ssh and you want to run a
command that takes a long time
and then exit the ssh session but
leave the command running even though you are no longer connected then nohup
lets you do just that.

For instance, I use my Raspberry PI to download distributions for review purposes.

I never have my Raspberry PI connected to a display nor do I have a keyboard and

mouse connected to it.

I always connect to the Raspberry PI via ssh from a laptop. If I started downloading
a large file on the Raspberry PI without using the nohup command then I would
have to wait for the download to finish before logging off the ssh session and before
shutting down the laptop. If I did this then I may as well have not used the
Raspberry PI to download the file at all.

To use nohup all I have to type is nohup followed by the command as follows:

nohup wget http://mirror.is.co.za/mirrors/linuxmint.com/iso//stable

/17.1/linuxmint-17.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso &

05 Running A Linux Command 'AT' A Specific

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Time
The 'nohup' command is good if you
are connected to an SSH server
and you want the command to
remain running after logging out of
the SSH session.

Imagine you want to run that same

command at a specific point in time.

The 'at' command allows you to do just that. 'at' can be used as follows.

at 10:38 PM Fri
at> cowsay 'hello'
 at> CTRL + D

The above command will run the program cowsay at 10:38 PM on Friday evening.

The syntax is 'at' followed by the date and time to run.

When the at> prompt appears, enter the command you want to run at the specified
time.

The CTRL + D returns you to the cursor.

There are lots of different date and time formats and it is worth checking the man
pages for more ways to use 'at'.

06 Man Pages
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Man pages give you an outline of

what commands are supposed to
do and the switches that can be
used with them.

The man pages are kind of dull on

their own. (I guess they weren't
designed to excite us).

You can, however, do things to make your usage of man more appealing.

export PAGER=most

You will need to install 'most; for this to work but when you do it makes your man
pages more colorful.

You can limit the width of the man page to a certain number of columns using the
following command:

export MANWIDTH=80

Finally, if you have a browser available you can open any man page in the default
browser by using the -H switch as follows:

man -H <command>

Note this only works if you have a default browser set up within the $BROWSER
environment variable.
07 Use htop To View And Manage Processes
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Which command do you currently use to find

out which processes are running on your
computer? My bet is that you are using 'ps'
and that you are using various switches to
get the output you desire.

Install 'htop'. It is definitely a tool you will wish

that you installed earlier.

htop provides a list of all running processes in the terminal much like the file
manager in Windows.

You can use a mixture of function keys to change the sort order and the columns
that are displayed. You can also kill processes from within htop.

To run htop simply type the following into the terminal window:

htop

08 Navigate The File System Using ranger

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If htop is immensely useful for

controlling the processes running
via the command line then ranger is
immensely useful for navigating the
file system using the command line.

You will probably need to install

ranger to be able to use it but once
installed you can run it simply by typing the following into the terminal:

ranger

The command line window will be much like any other file manager but it works left
to right rather than top to bottom meaning that if you use the left arrow key you
work your way up the folder structure and the right arrow key works down the folder
structure.

It is worth reading the man pages before using ranger so that you can get used to
all keyboard switches that are available.
09 Cancel A Shutdown
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So you started the shutdown either

via the command line or from the
GUI and you realized that you really
didn't want to do that.

shutdown -c

Note that if the shutdown has

already started then it may be too late to stop the shutdown.

Another command to try is as follows:

pkill shutdown

10 Killing Hung Processes The Easy Way

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Imagine you are running an

application and for whatever
reason, it hangs.

You could use 'ps -ef' to find the

process and then kill the process or
you could use 'htop'.

There is a quicker and easier

command that you will love called xkill.

Simply type the following into a terminal and then click on the window of the
application you want to kill.

xkill

What happens though if the whole system is hanging?

Hold down the 'alt' and 'sysrq' keys on your keyboard and whilst they are held down
type the following slowly:

REISUB

This will restart your computer without having to hold the power button.
11 Download Youtube Videos
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Generally speaking, most of us are

quite happy for Youtube to host the
videos and we watch them by
streaming them through our chosen
media player.

If you know you are going to be

offline for a while (i.e. due to a
plane journey or traveling between the south of Scotland and the north of England)
then you may wish to download a few videos onto a pen drive and watch them at
your leisure.

All you have to do is install youtube-dl from your package manager.

You can use youtube-dl as follows:

youtube-dl url-to-video

You can get the URL to any video on Youtube by clicking the share link on the
video's page. Simply copy the link and paste it into the command line (using the
shift + insert shortcut).

12 Download Files From The Web With wget

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The wget command makes it

possible for you to download files
from the web using the terminal.

The syntax is as follows:

wget path/to/filename

For example:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/antix-linux/files/Final/MX-
krete/antiX-15-V_386-full.iso/download

There are a large number of switches that can be used with wget such as -O which
lets you output the filename to a new name.

In the example above I downloaded AntiX Linux from Sourceforge. The filename
antiX-15-V_386-full.iso is quite long. It would be nice to download it as just
antix15.iso. To do this use the following command:

wget -O antix.iso http://sourceforge.net/projects/antix-linux/files/Final

/MX-krete/antiX-15-V_386-full.iso/download

Downloading a single file doesn't seem worth it, you could easily just navigate to
the web page using a browser and click the link.

If, however, you want to download a dozen files then being able to add the links to
an import file and use wget to download the files from those links will be much
quicker.

Simply use the the -i switch as follows:

wget -i /path/to/importfile

For more about wget visit http://www.tecmint.com/10-wget-command-examples-in-

linux/.

13 Steam Locomotive
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This one isn't so much useful as a

bit of fun.

Draw a steam train in your terminal

window using the following
command:

sl

14 Get Your Fortune Told

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Another one that isn't particularly

useful but just a bit of fun is the
fortune command.

Like the sl command, you might

need to install it from your
repository first.

Then simply type the following to

get your fortune told

fortune

15 Get A Cow To Tell Your Fortune

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Finally get a cow to tell you your

fortune using cowsay.

Type the following into your

terminal:

fortune | cowsay

If you have a graphical desktop you

can use xcowsay to get a cartoon cow to show your fortune:

fortune | xcowsay

cowsay and xcowsay can be used to display any message. For example to display
"Hello World" simply use the following command:

cowsay "hello world"