Unix Command 'Cheat Sheets'?

WCLPeter asks: "One of the things that I like about Linux is that once it's set up properly it tends to stay that way. I have had experience using Linux as I've set up a firewall for my xDSL line, but that was a while ago. Like all things, if you don't use it often, you forget how to use it. Which is what has happened to me. As I prepare to install a Slackware 8.0 ISO so I can play some Loki games I bought I wondered: Is there a Unix cheat-sheet?" If you were going to create such a cheatsheat, what commands would you have in it? Of course, you can't get all of the Unix commands on a single sheet of paper, but probably enough of them to at least get a new user confortable with navigation and file operations.

"I'm sure you all know the type. When you buy a book on a program/OS/Programming Language, it usually contains a page that lists all the functions or commands followed by a simple 1-2 line description of that command.

Something along the lines of:
ls: Used to display a directory listing.
gcc: GNU C Compiler. Used to compile 'C' files into program code.
etc... - The list continues in this fashion.

I know I could read the various FAQ's. Most FAQ's unfortunately follow the 'FAQ A leads to FAQ B which leads to FAQ C which leads back to FAQ A' format. It would be so much easier for newer users to graze down a list of 50-100+ commands, find one that -looks- sort of like what I want to do and type 'man <command>' for usage information."

Comments

grep

[mjoconnor81]

grep is definitly one of the more useful commands. when used to sort through the output of other commands using |

man

[laymil]

just give them one command: man. its got all sorts of information about the commands.

Re:man

[robwills]

Try:
man -k

You would be surprised how easy it is to find the appropriate topic.

You're missing the point.

[Jonny 290]

He's come across the one stumbling block that I have when switching back and forth from the 2000/Mac/Linux platforms in my home lab. What *ARE* the commands? He's looking for a master list of all those hundereds and thousands of commands so he can poke through and see if anything fits his needs. I know that i would absolutely *ADORE* something like this. Sure, *nix can do anything you damn well please, but to a casual Redhat user, you may start out knowing what you want to do but not how to do it.

I know that in the past, i've known exactly what I want to do (for example, start a new service and open an ipchains port for it from only a certain IP), but what would i look at to fix this?

Just a one command per line index would be wonderful.

'apropos'

[penguinboy]

'apropos' is a rather useful little command-line utility that, when given a topic as an argument, will print a list of man pages that may be related to that topic. Quite helpful when you don't know which man page it is you need..

Cheat Sheets

[dso]

I have developed a couple of "cheat sheets" for the Canadian Linux Users Group. The following sheets available include:

Linux Command Card
Slackware System Reference
File System Hierarchy
Samba Configuration

I have a couple for SQL Databases but they are not on the site yet. All these sheets are in PDF format so new users who use Windows can get the commands prior to installing Linux. Also, experienced Linux users will know how to read a PDF.

They are available at:

http://www.hexeon.com/clue/library/

Re:Cheat Sheets

[unitron]

I can see using PDF if you need to include diagrams of a carburetor with the instructions on how to rebuild the carburetor, but unless you have to include screen shots, why shouldn't a list of command line interface commands and a brief explanation of what they are and what they do, (and please, please, please, an explanation of how they got named whatever name they have) be just a simple text file?

Unix in a Nutshell

[Carey]

O'Reilly's UNIX in a Nutshell is the best short-form UNIX command reference you can get.

Use its pages to make up cheat-sheets with your favorite commands. I think that's about as simple as it gets with UNIX.

You will probably learn the commands more effectively by producing your own cheat sheets than by purchasing some produced by someone else. However, if that is what you are looking for, check at a university bookstore in the CS section. You can probably find that type of material there.

Re:Unix in a Nutshell

[dattaway]

Damn good book. Refreshingly concise. A must have.

I just wish all distributions would ship this one in their shrink wrap boxes as the technical reference manual.

Command Reference Cards

[RedLeg]

SSC, the publishers of Linux Journal, have been publishing (selling) pocket references for Unix, Linux, and specific Unix applications for years. They are printed on durable card stock, and are generally very useful for those occasionally used commands. Check out: SSC Product Listing.

set mode = BOFH

OTOH, RTFM: man man, man apropos, man $command

Some quick cheet sheets

[ehinojosa]

These come from Webmonkey, they cover some basic commands, might be a nice starting point:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/un ix _guide/

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/html/97/02/i nd ex3a.html

Role 'yer own

[/Idiot\]

I maintain my own cheet-sheet of about 1x A4 page. The reason I typed my own was two-fold:

a) I couldn't find one I liked, some are out there if you search but I want one with all the stuff I forget and only the stuff I forget, and

b) When I type it out with a description for the cheet sheet I tend to remember it more.

Because of the effect b) has on a) the document gets revised regularly. It's not that much to maintain after the initial bulk has been written.

I was once going to write a web page that would let you select 4 or 6 topics that you wanted out of a list of who knows how many and they would be presented to you on a web page in a format that you could print nicely, but that never happened :-( Hey CowboyNeil, feel like adding it to slash?

Another failed chance to put search engines to use

[Toodles]

First, a serious plug for refcards.com as they have a bunch of DAMN handy refference cards, including apache, perl, cvs, gdb, ANSI c, etc etc. However, they do not have one for basic *nix usage. So...

Here are some of the more promising results of a search from google.com (String used was :unix ref card pdf)

Unix Cheat Sheet
Unix Cheat Sheet
From Rice University : Very basic
Another Too large and outdated
Selection of Unix, Vi, and Emacs refferences Courtesy Univ. of Alberta.ca

You should be able to find what you need easy enough. I should also highly reccommend to everyone the linuxsecurity.com Linux Security guidesheet. Damn good reading to hardening your system. Here

Toodles

`man intro`

[Snowfox]

Check out 'man intro' or 'man 1 intro' on other unices, print that and use it.

For some reason Linux doesn't have a command reference there the way other ones do.

Command references and apropos

[danejasper]

SSC, one of the first publishers of Linux resources including Linux Journal, publishes a number of "Pocket References" including the "Linux Command Summary". It may meet your needs. Info at:

http://www.ssc.com/ssc/productlist.html.

A useful online tool, when paired with man pages, is the 'apropos' command. It can be used to search summaries of command functions to find the right command, then you can read the man page for that tool. For example:

# apropos search
apropos (1) - search the whatis database for strings
find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy
lkbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
lookbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
manpath (1) - determine user's search path for man pages
whatis (1) - search the whatis database for complete words.
zgrep (1) - search possibly compressed files for a regular expression

So, you can read these descriptions, and if one sounds like the tool you're looking for, call up the man page for that particular utility using "man".

For those missing man pages on the system, you can use my (somewhat outdated) man page web gateway at http://www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/man.

Happy Linuxing!

-Dane (last seen driving the North Bay backroads in a red 2001 Porsche Carerra with the California license plate "LINUX")

Re:sed and awk

[oneiros27]

There's an ORA book just on those two commands.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/

and the matching pocket reference

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sedawkrepr/

Also of relevance, the Effective AWK Programming book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/

and the regular expressions book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/

a few useful resources

[oneiros27]

The problem is, there are so many commands, it's hard to fit that much information into a small space. So, for quick reference, I normally turn to 'man -k' [which is the same as 'apropos'].
Failing that, a quick search through google or google groups.

Some people prefer printed materials, however, and I know that one of the folks here always seems to go for one book which just has the quick usage of most shell commands [but well, she doesn't get in for a few hours, and it wasn't obvious in her stacks of books] She also had the Linux Command Reference, published by the Linux Journal, which is slightly bigger than the ORA pocket books, but still very portable.

Once of the books that I started out with was the UNIX System Administration Handbook, which I've heard includes linux in the latest version. It's not cheap, it's not small, but it nicely organizes things by topic, and points out possible pitfalls.

Getting a summary of all commands

[martyb]

I agree that "man -k some_keyword" works well if you already know what you are looking for. But what if you don't know what you don't know? In other words, what if you want a list of all commands and a brief description of what they can do? Here are some variations that might get you a summary of every command:

man -k " " > cheat.txt
man -k "" > cheat.txt

NOTE: The first example contains a single quoted space character as the argument; the second example contains no characters between the quotes.
The idea is to provide a parameter to the keyword search that would match ALL commands. Hope this helps!

CAVEAT: I don't have a linux box handy to check these on; but I recall using something like this myself, when I was in the same boat many years ago.

Re:Getting a summary of all commands

[howardjp]

That segfaults on my Linux machine. Worked fine under FreeBSD and returned a 2000+ line file.

Re:Getting a summary of all commands

[Tassach]

try:

man -k "[aeiou]" > foo

or

man -k "[aeiou]" | enscript

Re:Getting a summary of all commands

[spudnic]

man -k *

And if you can't remember man with a switch, you can always just use the "apropos" command.

Of course you need filename completion because I can never spell apropos correctly.

If someone where to ask, I'd say it was spelled apr[TAB] ;)

More useful: a list of one-liners

[Tassach]

What's even better than a simple cheat sheet of the basic commands is a list of useful one-liners: little 2 or 3 command scripts using odd switches that do somthing useful. Learning the basic unix commands is pretty trivial next to learning how to string them together to do neat things. EG:

ls -at | head -n1 : list the most recently modified file in the current directory

ps h -u user | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9 : terminate all jobs owned by user.

GNU awk reference is excellent

[Medievalist]

Arnold Robbins' GNU Awk reference manual, shopped by the Free Software Foundation, is quite excellent.
Gawk has a simple means of using fixed fields which is not available in other awks (there are many awks, but Gawk runs on pretty much any OS - certainly on all major OSes - and it's free).
Gawk is like perl, only more elegant, and lacking the network sockets. Gawk and netcat in combination can do most anything perl can do, though, and often faster.
--Charlie

Re:Why PDF

[unitron]

Which brings us back to my original question--What about one of these would need to be anything other than text?

Re:Why PDF

[firewort]

Because carriage returns in plain text aren't the same from *nix to Win to Mac.

Loading up a document in notepad and having it linewrap with non-alphabetic charachters is fugly.

PDF avoids this problem, but with a size trade-off.

Like he said, if you want to make them into text, go for it, but for him, his preference was PDF.

Re:ll

[SuiteSisterMary]

And when you go on call to a hardcore AIX or Solaris shop, where they use sh, and you don't even know what !! means, you're kinda screwed. Don't handicap yourself.

Re:ll

[spudnic]

It's not like learning on VIM is going to make you unable to deal with a situation. If you do find yourself up against a box that only has vi installed, you'll at least be able to go in, do simple edits, and save the file out.

Now only learning emacs would be a mistake, but I'm a bit biased ;)

Re:ll

[spudnic]

I find lg to be a good alias to have around...

alias lg='ls -la | grep $1'

Of course, you really need to know the commands before you start using all these aliases. It's important.