We’ve looked at various shell commands in the last few tutorials, but they have each been in the context of performing a particular task. It’s time to take an overview of some of the general-purpose commands. There are thousands of terminal commands, from the commonplace to the arcane, but you need only a handful of key commands to get started. Here we will look at some of the core workhorse commands, giving a brief description of what each one is for. As always, the man pages give far more detail on how to use them. Many of these produce more output than can fit in your terminal display, so consider piping them through less.
Central to any terminal activity is working with files, creating, removing, listing and otherwise examining them.…
