20 Linux basic commands for beginners

Linux is command line interface which is a most popular operating system for servers and internet. It is safe, secure and free operating system. Here we will discuss few Linux basic commands which will be helpful for beginners. You can make required changes and sell it as your distribution. There are many Linux distributors presently like red hat, Ubuntu, mint, fedora. Most popular smartphone operating system Android runs on Linux only.

Linux is the terminal based operating system.  Unlike Windows, Linux is the command operated system. You need to manually enter commands in the terminal and run to get the desired output. Let us explore few basic Linux commands.

Linux Basic Commands

1 pwd

This command displays the present working directory of your system. The forward slash separates directories.

2. ls

ls command display all files in the present directory. If you want to include hidden files also, then the command should be ls-a which means list all.

3. cd

cd command is used to go to the particular directory. For example, if you want to go to directory abc then the command should be cd abc.

4, mkdir

mkdir command is used to make directory. To create directory xyz, the command should be mkdir xyz.  For ab xyz, command should be mkdir ab/xyz

5. rmdir

This command removes empty directories. To remove any directory with files, there is rm command.

6. touch

touch command creates empty text or zip file. For example, touch new.txt

7. man

man stands for manual. It will display manuals for any commands, man cd will display manual page for cd command.

8. locate

locate command is used to locate the file in the Linux operating system just like search in the windows system.

9. sudo

sudo is the most widely used command in Linux. sudo stands for superuser do. With the help of this command, we can have administrative rights to run any command.

10 df

df will show free disk space of your system in each partition.

11. du

du will show used disk space of your system in each partition.

12 zip unzip

As the name suggests, zip/unzip commands compress and extract files in Linux.

13 uname

uname command display information about your Linux distribution system

14 apt-get

apt-get installs packages on Linux. This command requires administrative rights, so sudo is used with it.

sudo apt-get install xyz

to update/upgrade any package, sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade

15 chmod

chmod command makes the file executable.

16 hostname

hostname command displays IP of your system. 4 hostname -i

17 ping

ping command checks the connection to the server.  ping google.com

18 clear

As the name suggests, clear command clears terminal.

19 exit

you can exit terminal by exit command

20 reboot

To reboot your system, sudo reboot and to power off your system, command is sudo halt.

Summary

These are some very important Linux basic commands for beginners. You should be very careful while working with few commands as a small mistake can lead to your system failure and data loss.  We shall discuss more advanced commands in another post.

Tags: computer, linux

Category: General