when I forget to include sudo in my command:

sudo !!

I use $_ a lot, it allows you to use the last parameter of the previous command in your current command

mkdir something && cd $_

nano file
chmod +x $_

As a simple example.

If you want to create nested folders, you can do it in one go by adding -p to mkdir

mkdir -p bunch/of/nested/folders

Good explanation here:
https://koenwoortman.com/bash-mkdir-multiple-subdirectories/q

Sometimes starting a service takes a while and you're sitting there waiting for the terminal to be available again. Just add --no-block to systemctl and it will do it on the background without keeping the terminal occupied.

systemctl start --no-block myservice

Ctrl-z to suspend the running program.

bg to make it continue running in the background.

jobs to get an overview of background programs.

fg to bring a program to the foreground.

It isn't a command but an application. I cannot do my work without it.

screen

I only recently started using C-r to search in the command history. Game changer!

The watch command is very useful, for those who don't know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not "real time" because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

parallel, easy multithreading right in the command line. This is what I wish was included in every programming language's standard library, a dead simple parallelization function that takes a collection, an operation to be performed on the members of that collection, and optionally the max number of threads (should be the number of hardware threads available on the system by default), and just does it without needing to manually set up threads and handlers.

inotifywait, for seeing what files are being accessed/modified.

tail -F, for a live feed of a log file.

script, for recording a terminal session complete with control and formatting characters and your inputs. You can then cat the generated file to get the exact output back in your terminal.

screen, starts a terminal session that keeps running after you close the window/SSH and can be re-accessed with screen -x.

Finally, a more complex command I often find myself repeatedly hitting the up arrow to get:

find . -type f -name '*' -print0 | parallel --null 'echo {}'

Recursively lists every file in the current directory and uses parallel to perform some operation on them. The {} in the parallel string will be replaced with the path to a given file. The '*' part can be replaced with a more specific filter for the file name, like '*.txt'.

find /path/to/starting/dir -type f -regextype egrep -regex 'some[[:space:]]*regex[[:space:]]*(goes|here)' -exec mv {} /path/to/new/directory/ \;

I routinely have to find a bunch of files that match a particular pattern and then do something with those files, and as a result, find with -exec is one of my top commands.

If you're someone who doesn't know wtf that above command does, here's a breakdown piece by piece:

• find - cli tool to find files based on lots of different parameters
• /path/to/starting/dir - the directory at which find will start looking for files recursively moving down the file tree
• -type f - specifies I only want find to find files.
• -regextype egrep - In this example I'm using regex to pattern match filenames, and this tells find what flavor of regex to use
• -regex 'regex.here' - The regex to be used to pattern match against the filenames
• -exec - exec is a way to redirect output in bash and use that output as a parameter in the subsequent command.
• mv {} /path/to/new/directory/ - mv is just an example, you can use almost any command here. The important bit is {}, which is the placeholder for the parameter coming from find, in this case, a full file path. So this would read when expanded, mv /full/path/of/file/that/matches/the/regex.file /path/to/new/directory/
• \; - This terminates the command. The semi-colon is the actual termination, but it must be escaped so that the current shell doesn't see it and try to use it as a command separator.

ripgrep has mostly replaced grep for me, and I am extremely conservative about replacing core POSIX utilities - muscle memory is critical. I also tend to use fd, mainly because of its forking -x, but its advantages over find are less stark þan rg's improvements over grep.

nnn is really handy; I use it for everything but the most trivial renames, copies, and moves - anyþing involving more þan one file. It's especially handy when moving files between servers because of þe built-in remote mounting.

I'd say that journalctl is not only boot, but every service that runs on the computer has its logs collected through it, so you can use it as journalctl --grep="your regex". You can also add -k to check kernel logs, -b -n to check nth precedent boot or -b n to check the absolute nth boot. There is a lot that you can check with it and it is quite nice :)

Otherwise, I like eza as an ls replacement, or batcat as a human friendly cat

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up--also don't transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you're going to uncompress it as soon as you download it---just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

echo 'dXIgbW9tCmhhaGEgZ290dGVtCg==' | base64 -d

I'm a big enjoyer of pushd and popd

so if youre in a working dir and need to go work in a different dir, you can pushd ./, cd to the new dir and do your thing, then popd to go back to the old dir without typing in the path again

sudo shutdown 0

Prevents 99% of bugs and mistakes

Another one of my favorite is ctrl+r to quickly search for a previous command.

Then type in a word from the command you are looking for and then hit tab to find the right command if there is more than one with that word.

Not a command but the tab key for auto complete. This made it much easier for me.

Search for github repos of dotfiles and read through people's shell profiles, aliases, and functions. You'll learn a lot.

Something that really improved my life was learn to properly use find, grep, xargs and sed. Besides that, there are these two little 'hacks' that are really handy at times...

1- find out which process is using some local port (i.e. the modern netstat replacement):

$ ss -ltnp 'sport = :<port-number>'

2- find out which process is consuming your bandwidth:

$ sudo nethogs

https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

# list all recursive files sorted by size  
$ fd -tf "" -x du -h | sort -h  
8.0K      ./asdfrc  
 20K      ./nvim/lua/lush_theme/bleak.lua  
 32K      ./alacritty.yml  

# find files by extension  
$ fd -e lua  
nvim/colors/bleak.lua  
nvim/init.lua  
nvim/lua/config/autocmds.lua  

# list found files in tree view  
$ fd -e lua | tree --fromfile  
.  
└── nvim  
    ├── colors  
    │   └── bleak.lua  
    ├── init.lua  

# Run "npm test" when a file changes in the src or test directories  
$ fd src test | entr -- npm test  

# find out how often you use each command  
history | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 10  
  80 rm  
  81 lsd  
 107 asdf  
 136 npx  
 161 find  
 176 fd  
 182 cd  
 185 rg  
 247 brew  
 250 nb  
 465 npm  
 867 git  

I get a lot of mileage out of the line editing commands. I think they are Emacs based and optional... but like Ctrl k, Ctrl u, Ctrl a.

pkill journalctl -b nvtop tail are great but I like: LANGUAGE=en_GB LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 <your GUI program> to run a GUI program in English for more universal compatibility for helping newbies and creating/reading non-terminal based documentation

List open files sudo lsof -i -P

Network traffic by hardware sudo tcpdump -i en1 -nn -s0

Current processes top -l 1

Bash/ZSH aliases are invaluable for commands that you run often. I use micro as my terminal editor so I have alias m for micro and sm for sudo micro. Just 2 of maybe a dozen aliases I use. Docker has quite a large list of aliases with ZSH. Super super useful. 

ripgrep

fzf is great for quickly finding files e.g. in large code repositories.

tcpdump can help diagnose network issues.

I'm not much of a one-liner collector but I like this one:

vim +copen -q <(grep -r -n <search> .) 

which searches for some string and opens all instances in vim's quickfix list (and opens the quickfix window too). Navigate the list with :cn and :cn. Complex-ish edits are the obvious use case, but I use this for browsing logs too.

Neovim improves on this with nvim -q - and [q/]q, and plenty of fuzzy finder plugins can do a better version using ripgrep, but this basic one works on any system that has gnu grep and vim.

Edit:

This isn't exactly a command, but I can't imagine not knowing about this anymore:

$ man grep
/  -n       # double space before the dash!

brings you directly to the documentation of the -n option. Not the useless synopsis or any other paragraphs that mention -n in passing, but the actual doc for this option (OK, very occasionally it fails due to word wrap, but assuming the option is documented then it works 99% of the time).

(Fixed the bolding issue)

From a file I keep since I started using Linux near 5 years ago:

Display the RAM usage:
watch -n 5 free -m
Useful if you open way too much stuff and/or you're running on budget processing power, and don't want your computer freezing from 3 hours.
Also useful if you use KDE's Konsole integrated into the Dolphin file manager and you must for some reason not close the Dolphin window. You'd just need to open Dolphin's integrated Konsole (F4), run the command and without closing it, press F4 again to hide the Konsole.

Terminal-based file browser that sorts by total size:
ncdu
why is the cache folder 50 GB big?

Mass-check MD5 hashes for all files in the path, including subfolders:
find -type f \( -not -name "md5sum.txt" \) -exec md5sum '{}' \; > md5sum.txt
Change md5sum (and optionally the output file's name) for your favorite/needed hash calculator command.

For mounting ISOs and similar formats:
sudo mount -o loop path/to/iso/file/YOUR_ISO_FILE.ISO /mnt/iso

And unmounting the file:
sudo umount /mnt/iso
Beware there's no N in the umount command

For creating an ISO from a mounted disc:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image_name.iso

And for a folder and its files and subfolders:
mkisofs -o /path/to/output/disc.iso /path/from/input/folder

Compress and split files:
7z -v100m a output_base_file.7z input_file_or_folder

Changes the capslock key into shiftlock on Linux Mint (not tested in other distros):
setxkbmap -option caps:shiftlock
Was useful when the shift key from a previous computer broke and I didn't have a spare keyboard.

If you want to run Japanese programs on Wine, you can use:
LC_ALL=ja_JP wine /path/to/the/executable.exe
There are other options but this is one that worked the better for me so I kinda forgor to take note of them.

List all files in a given path and its subfolders:
find path_to_check -type f
Tip: add > output.txt or >> output.txt if you'd rather have the list in a TXT file.

Running a program in Wine in a virtual desktop:
wine explorer /desktop=session_name,screen_size /path/to/the/executable.exe

E.g.:
wine explorer /desktop=MyDesktop,1920x1080 Game.exe

Useful if you don't want to use the whole screen, there are integration issues between Linux, Wine and the program, or the program itself has issues when alt-tabbing or similar (looking at you, 2000's Windows games)

Download package installers from with all their dependencies:
apt download package_name
Asks for sudo password even when not running as sudo. Downloaded files come with normal user permissions thankfully. Also comes with an installation script but if you want to run it offline, iirc you need to change apt install in the script for dpkg -i.

If you use a program you'd rather not connect to the internet but without killing the whole system's connection, try:
firejail --net=none the_command_you_want_to_run

Or if you want to run an appimage:
firejail --net=none --appimage the_command_you_want_to_run

If you want to make aliases (similar to commands from Windows' PATH) and your system uses bash, edit the file $HOME/.bashrc (e.g. with Nano) and make the system use the updated file by either logging out and in, or running . ~/.bashrc

Python/Pip have some nifty tools, like Cutlet (outputs Japanese text as Romaji), gogrepoc (for downloading stuff from your account using GOG's API), itch-dl (same as gogrepoc but for Itch.io), etc. If you lack the coding skills and doesn't mind using LLMs, you could even ask one to make some simpler Python scripts (key word though: simpler).

If you want to run a video whose codec isn't supported by your system (e.g. Raspberrian which only supports H.264, up to 1080p):
ffmpeg -i input_video.mkv -map 0 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -vf scale=1920:1080 -c:a copy -c:s copy output_video.mkv

@marighost I dont use Prox, but for various random linux commands.. ive got a wealth. :D in the journalctl vein.

journalctl -xeu \<service name\>

ex: journalctl -xeu httpd

Gives you the specific journal output for the given service. In this example. httpd.

Also, journalctl is more than boot logs, its all of your logs from anything controlled by systemd. Mounts, services, timers, even sockets.

For example. On my system, i have /var/home as a mount. systemctl and journalctl can give me info on it with:

systemctl status var-home.mount
journalctl -xeu var-home.mount

You can see all of the mounts with.
systemctl list-units --type=mount

Or, see all of your services with
systemctl list-units --type=service

Or all of your timers with
systemctl list-timers

We do a weekly show on getting into linux terminals, commands, tricks, and share our experience.. It's called Into the Terminal. on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux youtube channel. I'll send you a link if you're interested.

redshift -O 5000: 'redshift' is a utility that adjusts the color temperature of your display, '-O' allows you to set a specific temperature, and '5000' is what I like.

Edit: I also like xkill. xkill lets you click on a window or program and kills it. I need to do this frequently every time exit Kodi; the program stops, but the window is still there.

I think vipe is underrated; it takes whatever is on its stdin, shoves it in a temp file, opens your favorite text editor (EDITOR environment variable) and waits in the background until you finish editing the file and close it. Then it outputs the edited text to its stdout.

It's useful in all kinds of pipes, but personally I use it tons of times a day in combination with xclip, in something like this:

xclip -o -selection primary | vipe | xclip -i -selection clipboard

(I actually have a bit fancier version of this pipe wrapped in a Bash function named xvxx.)

On my setup, this takes my current text selection, opens it in vim, and lets me edit it before it sends it to the "traditional" Ctrl+C clipboard. It's super handy for editing comments like this one.

If you often find yourself writing complex Bash pipelines involving generating some output and then running set of commands per line (perhaps in a while loop), sometimes replacing the "selection part" with vipe can be easier than coming up with right filter.

find_or_ls_or_grep_something | vipe | for while read -r foo; do some_action "$foo"; done

And if you are really confident with Bash, you can go even a step further and do:

you might find something like this useful sometimes:

find_or_ls_or_grep_something | vipe | bash

and just create a large dumb one-off script, manually curating what's exactly done. Remember that editing large lists in vim can be made much easier by utilizing vim's ability to invoke unix filter commands (those greps and uniqs and seds et al.) on the buffer, and /or block editing mode using Ctrl+V (that last one method goes really well with column -t).

Absolute favourite is | the pipe command.

Number one will forever and ever be strace

Deleted comment.

I double posted as Mlem didn’t show my initial comment after posting for some reason.

(Edit)

i do not know if this counts as a command but you might want to check Atuin, what it does is help you find, manage and edit the commands you used in your shell history saves you a lot of time

docker run --rm -it --privileged --pid=host debian:12 nsenter -a -t1 "$(which bash)"

If your user is in the docker group, and you are not running rootless Docker, this command opens a bash shell as root.

How it works:

• docker run --rm -it creates a temporary container and attaches it to the running terminal
• --privileged disables some of the container's protections
• --pid=host attaches the container to the host's PID namespace, allowing it to access all running processes
• debian:12 uses the Debian 12 image
• nsenter -a -t1 enters all the namespaces of the process with PID 1, which is the host's init since we use --pid=host
• "$(which bash)" finds the path of the host's bash and runs it inside the namespaces (plain bash may not work on NixOS hosts)

alias cd..='cd ..'
alias ll='LC_COLLATE=C ls -alFh'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

rpm-ostree status

rpm-ostree reset

rpm-ostree rebase

idk i love rpm-ostree man

cd `pwd`

for when you want to stay in a dìr that gets deleted and recreated.

cat /proc/foo/exe > program
cat /proc/foo/fd/bar > file

to undelete still-running programs and files still opened in running programs

ps -ef | grep <process_name

Kill -9 proces id

I googled that -15 is better, I forgot what -9 even did, been using it for years.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot.

Ha! Remember back when there was no fstab fuckery? Good times. But you have a massive init blob slowly eating other services and replacing them with shitty replicants like this embarrassment (ohai root NFS) and all of us Unix people are chuckling in our reduced-fuckery 'hell'.

I'll go with a simple one here:

CTRL+SHIFT C/V for copy paste.

Or if it has to be terminal;

kill

😊

I like emerge --moo, just to See how larry is doing. Only gentoo tho :(

These aliases for zsh I use all the time. It's part of the prezto configuration framework.

setopt AUTO_CD              # Auto changes to a directory without typing cd.
setopt AUTO_PUSHD           # Push the old directory onto the stack on cd.
setopt PUSHD_IGNORE_DUPS    # Do not store duplicates in the stack.
setopt PUSHD_SILENT         # Do not print the directory stack after pushd or popd.
setopt PUSHD_TO_HOME        # Push to home directory when no argument is given.

alias d='dirs -v'
for index ({1..9}) alias "$index"="cd +${index}"; unset index

Type d and enter to list all the directories you've recently been in, then type the number at the start of the line followed by enter to immediately cd there.

Not sure if latest bash can do it the same thing, but some years ago I wrote a script to implement it there too. IIRC it might've been the automatic removal of duplicates in dir history that was missing.

lower the monitor black for my tired eyes

xrandr --output eDP-1 --gamma .7:.7:.7

There are a lot of great commands in here, so here are my favorites that I haven't seen yet:

• crontab -e
• && and || operators
• ">" and >> chevrons and input/output redirection
• for loops, while/if/then/else
• Basic scripts
• Stdin vs stdout vs /dev/null

Need to push a file out to a couple dozen workstations and then install it?

for i in $(cat /tmp/wks.txt); do echo $i; rsync -azvP /tmp/file $i:/opt/dir/; ssh -qo Connect timeout=5 $i "touch /dev/pee/pee"; done

Or script it using if else statements where you pull info from remote machines to see if an update is needed and then push the update if it's out of date. And if it's in a script file then you don't have search through days of old history commands to find that one function.

Or just throw that script into crontab and automate it entirely.

fabien@debian2080ti:~$ history  | sed 's/ ..... //' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
# with parameters
     13 cd Prototypes/
     14 adb disconnect; cd ~/Downloads/Shows/ ; adb connect videoprojector ;
     14 cd ..
     21 s # alias s='ssh shell -t "screen -raAD"'
     36 node .
     36 ./todo 
     42 vi index.js 
     42 vi todo # which I use as metadata or starting script in ~/Prototypes
     44 ls
    105 lr # alias lr="ls -lrth"
fabien@debian2080ti:~$ history  | sed 's/ ..... //' | sed 's/ .*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
# without parameters
     35 rm
     36 node
     36 ./todo
     39 git
     39 mv
     70 ls
     71 adb
     96 cd
    110 lr
    118 vi

Running Wine is the command I've used the most probs, you can tell I haven't touched the thing in months.

A couple I use (concept of not exact), that I haven't seen in the thread yet:

Using grep as diff: grep -Fxnvf orig.file copy.file

Using xargs -

xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input.

EG: $ find ~/Pictures -name "*.png" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cvzf images.tar.gz