Command line tools every developer should know

gistfile1.md

Command line tools every developer should know

Prior reading

• The Unix philosophy, specially the "Make each program do one thing well" [1]

Basic

• File and directory navigation/manipulation (ls, cd, mkdir, rm, rmdir, touch, cp, mv)
• ln/unlink/readlink
• find/locate
• chmod
• chown
• man/info
• su/sudo
• set/export (environment variables in general, specially PATH)
• which
• df
• history

Text editing

• vi (enough to open/edit/save a file)

Text processing

• cat
• head/tail
• more/less
• grep
• awk/sed/cut
• (regular expression in general)
• wc
• diff
• tr

Streams, pipes and redirects

• <<
• |
• xargs
• tee

Networking

• ping
• netstat
• ssh/scp
• ngrep
• netcat
• curl
• wget
• telnet (mostly for port testing?)
• rsync
• lsof (-i)

Processes

• ps
• uptime
• top/htop
• nohup
• kill/pkill/killall
• &
• (Ctrl + Z)
• fg/bg/jobs
• crontab
• lsof

File archiving and compressing

• tar (including manipulating gzip/bzip)
• zip

References

[1] The Art of Unix Programming (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html)

Resources

• Manual pages ('man' command)
• SS64 command references: http://ss64.com/bash/
• Useful command snippets: http://commandlinefu.com
• Useful aliases: http://alias.sh
• Command Line Crash Course: http://cli.learncodethehardway.org/book/

Great additions, Tom - never heard of watch, and didn't know about less's follow and filter options.

+1 for tee as well

@tomwhoiscontrary Thanks A LOT for the contributions. It will take me a bit to go through all of them...

But as a start I removed the "-f" reference. I was not aware of the less option. It does seem like a better option indeed.

I'm overwhelmed by the feedback I've got so far. Thank you all for the help.

Seriously considering moving this into something a bit more well structured than a gist...

I'd switch from "vi" to something along the lines of "vi, emacs, nano, or another ubiquitous term based text editor"

@jredville the reason I only mention vi is because I'm yet to see a unix box where it's not there. The same does not apply to other editors, so that's why I believe it's essential to know the minimum of vi in case you get to a machine without install privileges.

Added more commands (Thanks again, @tomwhoiscontrary).

tmux - I think you should add this as well. It's so very handy when working on multiple servers and multiple tasks.