This is a selection of command-line tips that I've found useful over the years when working on Linux. It's organized a bit like a journey, from command-line novice to expert. Some tips are elementary, and some sophisticated enough very few people know them.
The goals are brevity and broad coverage of important tips that a technical user will find useful or time-saving. It's a bit long, and users certainly don't need to know all of them, but I've done my best to review that each item is worth reading in terms of projected time savings, if you use Linux heavily. It's written for Linux, but many items apply equally to MacOS. Items are intentionally minimal, with the expectation you can use `man`, `apt-get`/`yum`, or Google for more background.
I originally wrote much of this as an answer [on Quora](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-time-saving-tips-that-every-Linux-user-should-know), but given the interest there, it seems it's worth moving the list to Github, where people more talented than I can readily suggest improvements. If you see an error or something that could be better, please submit a PR!
- Learn basic Bash. Actually, type `man bash` and at least skim the whole thing; it's pretty easy to follow and not that long. Alternate shells can be nice, but bash is powerful and always available (learning mainly zsh, fish, etc. restricts you in many situations).
- Basic file management: `ls` and `ls -l` (in particular, learn what every column in `ls -l` means), `less`, `head`, `tail` and `tail -f`, `ln` and `ln -s` (learn the differences and advantages of hard versus soft links), `chown`, `chmod`, `du` (for a quick summary of disk usage: `du -sk *`), `df`, `mount`.
- In bash, use Ctrl-W to kill the last word, and Ctrl-U to kill the line. See man readline for default keybindings in bash. There are a lot. For example Alt-. cycles through prevous arguments, and Alt-* expands a glob.
- If you are halfway through typing a command but change your mind, hit Alt-# to add a # at the beginning and enter it as a comment (or use Ctrl-A, #, enter). You can then return to it later via command history.
- Use `xargs` (or `parallel`). It's very powerful. Note you can control how many items execute per line (-L) as well as parallelism (-P). If you're not sure if it'll do the right thing, use xargs echo first. Also, -I{} is handy. Examples:
- In bash scripts, use set -x for debugging output.
- In bash scripts, use strict modes whenever possible. Use `set -e` to abort on errors. Use `set -o pipefail` as well, to be strict about errors (though this topic is a bit subtle). For more involved scripts, also use `trap`.
- In bash scripts, subshells (written with parentheses) are convenient ways to group commands. A common example is to temporarily move to a different working directory, e.g.
- In bash, note there are lots of kinds of variable expansion. Checking a variable exists: `${name:?error message}`. For example, if a bash script requires a single argument, just write `input_file=${1:?usage: $0 input_file}`. Arithmetic expansion: `i=$(( (i + 1) % 5 ))`. Sequences: `{1..10}`. Trimming of strings: `${var%suffix}` and `${var#prefix}`. For example if `var=foo.pdf`, then `echo ${var%.pdf}.txt` prints `foo.txt`.
- In Bash, redirect both standard output and standard error via: `some-command >logfile 2>&1`. Often, to ensure a command does not leave an open file handle to standard input, tying it to the terminal you are in, it is also good practice to add `</dev/null`.
- It can be useful to make a few optimizations to your ssh configuration; for example, this `~/.ssh/config` contains settings to avoid dropped connections in certain network environments, not require confirmation connecting to new hosts, forward authentication, and use compression (which is helpful with scp over low-bandwidth connections):
- To get the permissions on a file in octal form, which is useful for system configuration but not available in `ls` and easy to bungle, use something like
- Know that locale affects a lot of command line tools, including sorting order and performance. Most Linux installations will set `LANG` or other locale variables to a local setting like US English. This can make sort or other commands run many times slower. (Note that even if you use UTF-8 text, you can safely sort by ASCII order for many purposes.) To disable slow i18n routines and use traditional byte-based sort order, use `export LC_ALL=C` (in fact, consider putting this in your `~/.bashrc`).
- Know basic `awk` and `sed` for simple data munging. For example, summing all numbers in the third column of a text file: `awk '{ x += $3 } END { print x }'`. This is probably 3X faster and 3X shorter than equivalent Python.
- Know `sort`'s options. Know how keys work (`-t` and `-k`). In particular, watch out that you need to write `-k1,1` to sort by only the first field; `-k1` means sort according to the whole line.
- If you ever need to write a tab literal in a command line in bash (e.g. for the -t argument to sort), press Ctrl-V <tab> or write $'\t' (the latter is better as you can copy/paste it).
- To convert text encodings, try `iconv`. Or `uconv` for more advanced use; it supports some advanced Unicode things. For example, this command lowercases and removes all accents (by expanding and dropping them):
- To know disk/cpu/network status, use `iostat`, `netstat`, `top` (or the better `htop`), and (especially) `dstat`. Good for getting a quick idea of what's happening on a system.
- To know memory status, run and understand the output of `free` and `vmstat`. In particular, be aware the "cached" value is memory held by the Linux kernel as file cache, so effectively counts toward the "free" value.
- Java system debugging is a different kettle of fish, but a simple trick on Oracle's and some other JVMs is that you can run `kill -3 <pid>` and a full stack trace and heap summary (including generational garbage collection details, which can be highly informative) will be dumped to stderr/logs.
- Know about `strace` and `ltrace`. These can be helpful if a program is failing, hanging, or crashing, and you don't know why, or if you want to get a general idea of performance. Note the profiling option (`-c`), and the ability to attach to a running process (`-p`).
- Use `/proc`. It's amazingly helpful sometimes when debugging live problems. Examples: `/proc/cpuinfo`, `/proc/xxx/cwd`, `/proc/xxx/exe`, `/proc/xxx/fd/`, `/proc/xxx/smaps`.
- It is remarkably helpful sometimes that you can do set intersection, union, and difference of text files via `sort`/`uniq`. Suppose `a` and `b` are text files that are already uniqued. This is fast, and works on files of arbitrary size, up to many gigabytes. (Sort is not limited by memory, though you may need to use the `-T` option if `/tmp` is on a small root partition.) See also the note about `LC_ALL` above.
- Use `xargs` or `parallel` whenever you can. Note you can control how many items execute per line (`-L`) as well as parallelism (`-P`). If you're not sure if it'll do the right thing, use xargs echo first. Also, `-I{}` is handy. Examples:
- Say you have a text file, like a web server log, and a certain value that appears on some lines, such as an `acct_id` parameter that is present in the URL. If you want a tally of how many requests for each `acct_id`:
