List of common UNIX commands

eg:
    >man touch 

A good tip is to do this:

    >man man

Also, note that some of these commands might be disabled in your
specific version of UNIX. 

Warning- some of these programs act slightly different in different
distributions of UNIX. So before you use any of these, READ THE MAN
PAGE ON THE SYSTEM YOU INTEND TO RUN THE PROGRAM!

eg:
    the command killall on LINUX kills all processes of a certain name.
    the command killall on SOLARIS tries to kill all processes. period.

Have fun!
Mattias aka fimblo


Creating a New Empty File: touch 
Removing Files: rm 
Creating a Directory: mkdir 
Removing an Empty Directory: rmdir 
Copying Files: cp
Moving Files and Directories: mv
Creating Links: ln
Concatenating: cat 
Viewing a Page at a Time: less 
Peeking at the First Few Lines: head 
Peeking at the Last Few Lines: tail
An Improved Visual Editor: vi or vim
Checking Your Spelling: ispell
UNIX Manual Pages Searching for a Tool: apropos 
Getting a Brief Command Description: whatis 
Searching Standard Locations: whereis 
Reading Compressed Documentation: zless
Substitute User: su or ksu
Changing Your Password: passwd 
Changing Your Shell: chsh 
Check who you logged in as: whoami
Whos on the System: who and w 
Viewing and Setting the Date and Time: date 
Getting a Calendar: cal
Finding Files by Name: find 
Finding Files that Contain a Word or Pattern: grep
Counting Lines, Words, and Characters: wc 
Sorting Lines of Text: sort 
Formatting Text: fmt
Splitting Files into Smaller Files: split 
Accessing a Computer Through the Network: telnet 
Accessing a Computer Through the Network (using ssh): ssh
What to Back Up Simple Backups Tape Archive: tar
Tar UNIX Compressed Archives: gzip and Compress Windows Compressed Archives: zip
Listing the Current Top Processes: top 
Process Status: ps 
Nicing a process: nice and renice
Finding out How Much Disk Files Consume: du 
Finding out How Much Disk Files Consume in a nice formatted way: du | xdu 
Finding the Amount of Free Disk Space: df
Monitoring Logins: last 
print file: lpq
clear print queue: lprm