Meta
Scope:
- This guide is for both beginners and experienced users. The goals are breadth (everything important), specificity (give concrete examples of the most common case), and brevity (avoid things that aren't essential or digressions you can easily look up elsewhere). Every tip is essential in some situation or significantly saves time over alternatives.
- This is written for Linux, with the exception of the "macOS only" and "Windows only" sections. Many of the other items apply or can be installed on other Unices or macOS (or even Cygwin).
- The focus is on interactive Bash, though many tips apply to other shells and to general Bash scripting.
- It includes both "standard" Unix commands as well as ones that require special package installs -- so long as they are important enough to merit inclusion.
Notes:
- To keep this to one page, content is implicitly included by reference. You're smart enough to look up more detail elsewhere once you know the idea or command to Google. Use
apt
,yum
,dnf
,pacman
,pip
orbrew
(as appropriate) to install new programs. - Use Explainshell to get a helpful breakdown of what commands, options, pipes etc. do.
Basics
- Learn basic Bash. Actually, type
man bash
and at least skim the whole thing; it's pretty easy to follow and not that long. Alternate shells can be nice, but Bash is powerful and always available (learning only zsh, fish, etc., while tempting on your own laptop, restricts you in many situations, such as using existing servers). - Learn at least one text-based editor well. The
nano
editor is one of the simplest for basic editing (opening, editing, saving, searching). However, for the power user in a text terminal, there is no substitute for Vim (vi
), the hard-to-learn but venerable, fast, and full-featured editor. Many people also use the classic Emacs, particularly for larger editing tasks. (Of course, any modern software developer working on an extensive project is unlikely to use only a pure text-based editor and should also be familiar with modern graphical IDEs and tools.) Finding documentation:
- Know how to read official documentation with
man
(for the inquisitive,man man
lists the section numbers, e.g. 1 is "regular" commands, 5 is files/conventions, and 8 are for administration). Find man pages withapropos
. - Know that some commands are not executables, but Bash builtins, and that you can get help on them with
help
andhelp -d
. You can find out whether a command is an executable, shell builtin or an alias by usingtype command
. curl cheat.sh/command
will give a brief "cheat sheet" with common examples of how to use a shell command.
- Know how to read official documentation with
- Learn about redirection of output and input using
>
and<
and pipes using|
. Know>
overwrites the output file and>>
appends. Learn about stdout and stderr. - Learn about file glob expansion with
*
(and perhaps?
and[
...]
) and quoting and the differen - Be familiar with Bash job management:
&
, ctrl-z, ctrl-c,jobs
,fg
,bg
,kill
, etc. - Know
ssh
, and the basics of passwordless authentication, via `ssh - Basic file management:
ls
andls -l
(in particular, learn what every column inls -l
means),less
,head
,tail
andtail -f
(or even better,less +F
),ln
andln -s
(learn the differences and advantages of hard versus soft links),chown
,chmod
,du
(for a quick summary of disk usage:du -hs *
). For filesystem management,df
,mount
,fdisk
,mkfs
,lsblk
. Learn what an inode is (ls -i
ordf -i
). - Basic network management:
ip
orifconfig
,dig
,traceroute
,route
. - Learn and use a version control management system, such as
git
. - Know regular expressions well, and the various flags to
grep
/egrep
. The-i
,-o
,-v
,-A
,-B
, and-C
options are worth knowing. - Learn to use
apt-get
,yum
,dnf
orpacman
(depending on distro) to find and install packages. And make sure you havepip
to install Python-based command-line tools (a few below are easiest to install viapip
).
Everyday use
- In Bash, use Tab to complete arguments or list all available commands and ctrl-r to search through command history (after pressing, type to search, press ctrl-r repeatedly to cycle through more matches, press Enter to execute the found command, or hit the right arrow to put the result in the current line to allow editing).
- In Bash, use ctrl-w to delete the last word, and ctrl-u to delete the content from current curso
- Alternatively, if you love vi-style key-bindings, use
set -o vi
(andset -o emacs
to put it back). - For editing long commands, after setting your editor (f
- To see recent commands, use
history
. Follow with!n
(wheren
is the command number) to execute again. There are also many abbreviations you can use, the most useful probably being!$
for last argument and!!
for last command (see "HISTORY EXPANSION" in the man page). However, these are often easily replaced with ctrl-r and alt-.. - Go to your home directory with
cd
. Access files relative to your home directory with the~
prefix (e.g.~/.bashrc
). Insh
scripts refer to the home directory as$HOME
. - To go back to the previous working directory:
cd -
. - If you are halfway through typing a command but change your mind, hit alt-# to add a
#
at the beginning and enter it as a comment (or use ctrl-a, #, enter). You can then return to it later via command history. - Use
xargs
(orparallel
). It's very powerful. Note you can control how many items execute per line (-L
) as well as parallelism (-P
). If you're not sure if it'll do the right thing, usexargs echo
first. Also,-I{}
is handy. Examples:
find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep some_function
cat hosts | xargs -I{} ssh root@{} hostname
pstree -p
is a helpful display of the process tree.- Use
pgrep
andpkill
to find or signal processes by name (-f
is helpful). - Know the various signals you can send processes. For example, to suspend a process, use
kill -STOP [pid]
. For the full list, seeman 7 signal
- Use
nohup
ordisown
if you want a background process to keep ru - Check what processes are listening via
netstat -lntp
orss -plat
(for TCP; add-u
for UDP) orlsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -P -n
(which also works on macOS). - See also
lsof
andfuser
for open sockets and files. - See
uptime
orw
to know how long the system has been running. - Use
alias
to create shortcuts for commonly used commands. For example,alias ll='ls -latr'
creates a new aliasll
. - Save aliases, shell settings, and functions you commonly use in
~/.bashrc
, and arrange for login shells to source it. This will make your setup available in all your shell sessions. - Put the settings of environment variables as well as commands that should be executed when you login in
~/.bash_profile
. Separate configuration will be needed for shells you launch from graphical environment logins andcron
jobs. - Synchronize your configuration files (e.g.
.bashrc
and.bash_profile
) among various computers with Git. - Understand that care is needed when variables and filenames include whitespace. Surround your Bash variables with quotes, e.g.
"$FOO"
. Prefer the-0
or-print0
options to enable null characters to delimit filenames, e.g.locate -0 pattern | xargs -0 ls -al
orfind / -print0 -type d | xargs -0 ls -al
. To iterate on filenames containing whitespace in a for loop, set your IFS to be a newline only usingIFS=$'\n'
. - In Bash scripts, use
set -x
(or the variantset -v
, which logs raw input, including unexpanded variables and comments) for debugging output. Use strict modes unless you have a good reason not to: Useset -e
to abort on errors (nonzero exit code). Useset -u
to detect unset variable usages. Considerset -o pipefail
too, to abort on errors within pipes (though read up on it more if you do, as this topic is a bit subtle). For more involved scripts, also usetrap
on EXIT or ERR. A useful habit is to start a script like this, which will make it detect and abort on common errors and print a message:
set -euo pipefail
trap "echo 'error: Script failed: see failed command above'" ERR
- In Bash scripts, subshells (written with parentheses) are convenient ways to group commands. A common example is to temporarily move to a different working directory, e.g.
# do something in current dir
(cd /some/other/dir && other-command)
# continue in original dir
- In Bash, note there are lots of kinds of variable expansion. Checking a variable exists:
${name:?error message}
. For example, if a Bash script requires a single argument, just writeinput_file=${1:?usage: $0 input_file}
. Using a default value if a variable is empty:${name:-default}
. If you want to have an additional (optional) parameter added to the previous example, you can use something likeoutput_file=${2:-logfile}
. If$2
is omitted and thus empty,output_file
will be set tologfile
. Arithmetic expansion:i=$(( (i + 1) % 5 ))
. Sequences:{1..10}
. Trimming of strings:${var%suffix}
and${var#prefix}
. For example ifvar=foo.pdf
, thenecho ${var%.pdf}.txt
printsfoo.txt
. - Brace expansion using
{
...}
can reduce having to re-type similar text and automate combinations of items. This is helpful in examples likemv foo.{txt,pdf} some-dir
(which moves both files),cp somefile{,.bak}
(which expands tocp somefile somefile.bak
) ormkdir -p test-{a,b,c}/subtest-{1,2,3}
(which expands all possible combinations and creates a directory tree). Brace expansion is performe - The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion); word splitting; and filename expansion. (For example, a range like
{1..20}
cannot be expressed with variables using{$a..$b}
. Useseq
or afor
loop instead, e.g.,seq $a $b
orfor((i=a; i<=b; i++)); do ... ; done
.) - The output of a command can be treated like a file via
<(some command)
(known as process substitution). For example, compare local/etc/hosts
with a remote one:
diff /etc/hosts <(ssh somehost cat /etc/hosts)
- When writing scripts you may want to put all of your code in curly braces. If the closing brace is missing, your script will be prevented from executing due to a syntax error. This makes sense when your script is going to be downloaded from the web, since it prevents partially downloaded scripts from executing:
{
# Your code here
}
- A "here document" allows redirection of multiple lines of input as if from a file:
cat <<EOF
input
on multiple lines
EOF
- In Bash, redirect both standard output and standard error via:
some-command >logfile 2>&1
orsome-command &>logfile
. Often, to ensure a command does not leave an open file handle to standard input, tying it to the terminal you are in, it is also good practice to add</dev/null
. - Use
man ascii
for a good ASCII table, with hex and decimal values. For general encoding info,man unicode
,man utf-8
, andman latin1
are helpful. - Use
screen
ortmux
to multiplex the screen, especially useful on remote ssh sessions and to detach and re-attach to a session.byobu
can enhance screen or tmux by providing more information and easier management. A more minimal alternative for session persistence only isdtach
. - In ssh, knowing how to port tunnel with
-L
or-D
(and occasionally-R
) is useful, e.g. to access web sites from a remote server. - It can be useful to make a few optimizations to your ssh configuration; for example, this
~/.ssh/config
contains settings to avoid dropped connections in certain network environments, uses compression (which is helpful with scp over low-bandwidth connections), and multiplex channels to the same server with a local control file:
TCPKeepAlive=yes
ServerAliveInterval=15
ServerAliveCountMax=6
Compression=yes
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /tmp/%r@%h:%p
ControlPersist yes
- A few other options relevant to ssh are security sensitive and should be enabled with care, e.g. per subnet or host or in trusted networks:
StrictHostKeyChecking=no
,ForwardAgent=yes
- Consider
mosh
an alternative to ssh that uses UDP, avoiding dropped connections and adding convenience on the road (requires server-side setup). - To get the permissions on a file in octal form, which is useful for system configuration but not available in
ls
and easy to bungle, use something like
stat -c '%A %a %n' /etc/timezone
- For interactive selection of values from the output of another command, use
percol
orfzf
. - For interaction with files based on the output of another command (like
git
), usefpp
(PathPicker). - For a simple web server for all files in the current directory (and subdirs), available to anyone on your network, use:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 7777
(for port 7777 and Python 2) andpython -m http.server 7777
(for port 7777 and Python 3). - For running a command as another user, use
sudo
. Defaults to running as root; use-u
to specify another user. Use-i
to login as that user (you will be asked for your password). - For switching the shell to another user, use
su username
orsu - username
. The latter with "-" gets an environment as if another user just logged in. Omitting the username defaults to root. You will be asked for the password of the user you are switching to. - Know about the 128K limit on command lines. This "Argument list too long" error is common when wildcard matching large numbers of files. (When this happens alternatives like
find
andxargs
may help.) - For a basic calculator (and of course access to Python in general), use the
python
interpreter. For example,
>>> 2+3
5
Processing files and data
- To locate a file by name in the current directory,
find . -iname '*something*'
(or similar). To find a file anywhere by name, uselocate something
(but bear in mindupdatedb
may not have indexed recently created files). - For general searching through source or data f
- To convert HTML to text:
lynx -dump -stdin
- For Markdown, HTML, and all kinds of document conversion,
- If you must handle XML,
xmlstarlet
is old but good. - For JSON, use
jq
. For interactive use, also see [jid
](https://github.com/si - For YAML, use
shyaml
. - For Excel or CSV files, csvkit provides
in2csv
,csvcut
,csvjoin
,csvgrep
, etc. - For Amazon S3,
s3cmd
is convenient and [s4cmd
](https://gi - Know about
sort
anduniq
, including uniq's-u
and-d
options -- see one-liners below. See alsocomm
. - Know about
cut
,paste
, andjoin
to manipulate text files. Many people usecut
but forget aboutjoin
. - Know about
wc
to count newlines (-l
), characters (-m
), words (-w
) and bytes (-c
). - Know about
tee
to copy from stdin to a file and also to stdout, as inls -al | tee file.txt
. - For more complex calculations, including grouping, reversing fields, and statistical calculations, consider
datamash
. - Know that locale affects a lot of command line tools in subtle ways, including sorting order (collation) and performance. Most Linux installations will set
LANG
or other locale variables to a local setting like US English. But be aware sorting will change if you change locale. And know i18n routines can make sort or other commands run many times slower. In some situations (such as the set operations or uniqueness operations below) you can safely ignore slow i18n routines entirely and use traditional byte-based sort order, usingexport LC_ALL=C
. - You can set a specific command's environment by prefixing its invocation with the environment variable settings, as in
TZ=Pacific/Fiji date
. - Know basic
awk
andsed
for simple data munging. See One-liners for examples. - To replace all occurrences of a string in place, in one or more files:
perl -pi.bak -e 's/old-string/new-string/g' my-files-*.txt
- To rename multiple files and/or search and replace within files, try
repren
. (In some cases therename
command also allows multiple renames, but be careful as its functionality is not the same on all Linux distributions.)
# Full rename of filenames, directories, and contents foo -> bar:
repren --full --preserve-case --from foo --to bar .
# Recover backup files whatever.bak -> whatever:
repren --renames --from '(.*)\.bak' --to '\1' *.bak
# Same as above, using rename, if available:
rename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak
- As the man page says,
rsync
really is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It's known for synchronizing between machines but is equally useful locally. When security restrictions allow, usingrsync
instead ofscp
allows recovery of a transfer without restarting from scratch. It also is among the fastest ways to delete large numbers of files:
mkdir empty && rsync -r --delete empty/ some-dir && rmdir some-dir
- For monitoring progress when processing files, use
pv
,pycp
,pmonitor
,progress
,rsync --progress
, or, for block-level copying,dd status=progress
. - Use
shuf
to shuffle or select random lines from a file. - Know
sort
's options. For numbers, use-n
, or-h
for handling human-readable numbers (e.g. fromdu -h
). Know how keys work (-t
and-k
). In particular, watch out that you need to write-k1,1
to sort by only the first field;-k1
means sort according to the whole line. Stable sort (sort -s
) ca - If you ever need to write a tab literal in a command line in Bash (e.g. for the -t
- The standard tools for patching source code are
diff
andpatch
. See alsodiffstat
for summary statistics of a diff andsdiff
for a side-by-side diff. Notediff -r
works for entire directories. Usediff -r tree1 tree2 | diffstat
for a summary of changes. Usevimdiff
to compare and edit files. - For binary files, use
hd
,hexdump
orxxd
for simple hex dumps andbvi
,hexedit
orbiew
for binary editing. - Also for binary files,
strings
(plusgrep
, etc.) lets you find bits of text. - For binary diffs (delta compression), use
xdelta3
. - To convert text encodings, try
iconv
. Oruconv
for more advanced use; it supports some advanced Unicode things. For example:
# Displays hex codes or actual names of characters (useful for debugging):
uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Hex;' < input.txt
uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Name;' < input.txt
# Lowercase and removes all accents (by expanding and dropping them):
uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x '::Any-Lower; ::Any-NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] >; ::Any-NFC;' < input.txt > output.txt
- To split files into pieces, see
split
(to split by size) andcsplit
(to split by a pattern). - Date and time: To get the current date and time in the helpful [ISO 8601](h
- Use
zless
,zmore
,zcat
, andzgrep
to operate on compressed files. - File attributes are settable via
chattr
and offer a lower-level alternative to file permissions. For example, to protect against accidental file deletion the immutable flag:sudo chattr +i /critical/directory/or/file
- Use
getfacl
andsetfacl
to save and restore file permissions. For example:
getfacl -R /some/path > permissions.txt
setfacl --restore=permissions.txt
- To create empty files quickly, use
truncate
(creates sparse file),fallocate
(ext4, xfs, btrfs and ocfs2 filesystems),xfs_mkfile
(almost any filesystems, comes in xfsprogs package),mkfile
(for Unix-like systems like Solaris, Mac OS).
System debugging
- For web debugging,
curl
andcurl -I
are handy, or theirwget
equivalents, or the more modernhttpie
. - To know current cpu/disk status, the classic tools are `t
- For network connection details, use
netstat
andss
. - For a quick overview of what's happening on a system,
dstat
is especially useful. For broades - To know memory status, run and understand the output of
free
andvmstat
. In particular, be aware the "cached" value is memory held by the Linux kernel a - Java system debugging is a different kettle of fish, but a simple trick on Oracle's and some other JVMs is that you can run
kill -3 <pid>
and a full stack trace and heap summary (including generational - Use
mtr
as a better traceroute, to identify network issues. - For looking at why a disk is full,
ncdu
saves time over the usual commands likedu -sh *
. - To find which socket or process is using bandwidth, try
iftop
ornethogs
. - The
ab
tool (comes with Apache) is helpful for quick-and-dirty checking of web server perform - For more serious network debugging,
wireshark
,tshark
, orngrep
. - Know about
strace
andltrace
. These can be helpful if a program is failing, hanging, or crashing, and you don't know why, or if you want to get a general idea of performance. Note the profiling option (-c
), and the ability to attach to a running process (-p
). Use trace child option (-f
) to avoid missing important calls. - Know about
ldd
to check shared libraries etc — but never run it on untrusted files. - Know how to connect to a running process with
gdb
and get its stack traces. - Use
/proc
. It's amazingly helpful sometimes when debugging live problems. Examples:/proc/cpuinfo
,/proc/meminfo
,/proc/cmdline
,/proc/xxx/cwd
,/proc/xxx/exe
,/proc/xxx/fd/
,/proc/xxx/smaps
(wherexxx
is the process id or pid). - When debugging why something went wrong in the past,
sar
can be very helpful. It shows historic statistics on CPU, memory, network, etc. - For deeper systems and performance analyses, look at
stap
(SystemTap),perf
, andsysdig
. - Check what OS you're on with
uname
oruname -a
(general Unix/kernel info) orlsb_release -a
(Linux distro info). - Use
dmesg
whenever something's acting really funny (it could be hardware or driver issues). - If you delete a file and it doesn't free up expected disk space as reported by
du
, check whether the file is in use by a process:lsof | grep deleted | grep "filename-of-my-big-file"
One-liners
A few examples of piecing together commands:
- It is remarkably helpful sometimes that you can do set intersection, union, and difference of text files via
sort
/uniq
. Supposea
andb
are text files that are already uniqued. This is fast, and works on files of arbitrary size, up to many gigabytes. (Sort is not limited by memory, though you may need to use the-T
option if/tmp
is on a small root partition.) See also the note aboutLC_ALL
above andsort
's-u
option (left out for clarity below).
sort a b | uniq > c # c is a union b
sort a b | uniq -d > c # c is a intersect b
sort a b b | uniq -u > c # c is set difference a - b
- Pretty-print two JSON files, normalizing their syntax, then coloring and paginating the result:
diff <(jq --sort-keys . < file1.json) <(jq --sort-keys . < file2.json) | colordiff | less -R
- Use
grep . *
to quickly examine the contents of all files in a directory (so each line is paired with the filename), orhead -100 *
(so each file has a heading). This can be useful for directories filled with config settings like those in/sys
,/proc
,/etc
. - Summing all numbers in the third column of a text file (this is probably 3X faster and 3X less code than equivalent Python):
awk '{ x += $3 } END { print x }' myfile
- To see sizes/dates on a tree of files, this is like a recursive
ls -l
but is easier to read thanls -lR
:
find . -type f -ls
- Say you have a text file, like a web server log, and a certain value that appears on some lines, such as an
acct_id
parameter that is present in the URL. If you want a tally of how many requests for eachacct_id
:
egrep -o 'acct_id=[0-9]+' access.log | cut -d= -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
- To continuously monitor changes, use
watch
, e.g. check changes to files in a directory withwatch -d -n 2 'ls -rtlh | tail'
or to network settings while troubleshooting your wifi settings withwatch -d -n 2 ifconfig
. - Run this function to get a random tip from this document (parses Markdown and extracts an item):
function taocl() {
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line/master/README.md |
sed '/cowsay[.]png/d' |
pandoc -f markdown -t html |
xmlstarlet fo --html --dropdtd |
xmlstarlet sel -t -v "(html/body/ul/li[count(p)>0])[$RANDOM mod last()+1]" |
xmlstarlet unesc | fmt -80 | iconv -t US
}
Obscure but useful
expr
: perform arithmetic or boolean operations or evaluate regular expressionsm4
: simple macro processoryes
: print a string a lotcal
: nice calendarenv
: run a command (useful inprintenv
: print out envirolook
: find English words (or lines in a file) beginningcut
,paste
and `jofmt
: format text paragrappr
: format text into pages/columfold
: wrap lines of textcolumn
: format text fields into aligned, fexpand
andunexpand
: convert between tabs and spacesnl
: add line numbersseq
: print numbersbc
: calculatorfactor
: factor integersgpg
: encrypt and sitoe
: table of terminfo entriesnc
: network debugging and data transfersocat
: socket relay and tcp port- [
slurm
](https://github.com/ dd
: moving data between files or devicesfile
: identify type of a filetree
: display directories and subdirectories as a nesting tree;stat
: file infotime
: execute and time a commandtimeout
: execute a command for specified amount of time and stop the process when the slockfile
: create semaphorlogrotate
: rotate, compress andwatch
: run a commandwhen-changed
: runs any command you spetac
: print files in revcomm
: compare sorted files line by linestrings
: extract text from binary filestr
: character translation or manipulationiconv
oruconv
: conversion for text encodingssplit
andcsplit
: splitting filessponge
: read all input before writing it, useful for reading from then writing to the same file, e.g.,grep -v something some-file | sponge some-file
units
: unit conversions and calculations; converts furlongs per fortnight to twips per blink (see also/usr/share/units/definitions.units
)apg
: generates random passwordsxz
: high-ratio file compressionldd
: dynamic library infonm
: symbols from object filesab
orwrk
: benchmarking web serversstrace
: system call debuggingmtr
: better traceroute for network debuggingcssh
: visual concurrent shellrsync
: sync files and folders over SSH or in local file systemwireshark
andtshark
: packet capture and network debuggingngrep
: grep for the network layerhost
anddig
: DNS lookupslsof
: process file descriptor and socket infodstat
: useful system statsglances
: high level, multi-subsystem overviewiostat
: Disk usage statsmpstat
: CPU usage statsvmstat
: Memory usage statshtop
: improved version of toplast
: login historyw
: who's logged onid
: user/group identity infosar
: historic system statsiftop
ornethogs
: network utilization by socket or processss
: socket statisticsdmesg
: boot and system error messagessysctl
: view and configure Linux kernel parameters at run timehdparm
: SATA/ATA disk manipulation/performancelsblk
: list block devices: a tree view of your disks and disk partitionslshw
,lscpu
,lspci
,lsusb
,dmidecode
: hardware information, including CPU, BIOS, RAID, graphics, devices, etc.lsmod
andmodinfo
: List and show details of kernel modules.fortune
,ddate
, andsl
: um, well, it depends on whether you consider steam locomotives and Zippy quotations "useful"
macOS only
These are items relevant only on macOS.
- Package management with
brew
(Homebrew) and/orport
(MacPorts). These can be used to install on macOS many of the above commands. - Copy output of any command to a desktop app with
pbcopy
and paste input from one withpbpaste
. - To enable the Option key in macOS Terminal as an alt key (such as used in the commands above lik
- To open a file with a desktop app, use
open
oropen -a /Applications/Whatever.app
. - Spotlight: Search files with
mdfind
and list metadata (such as photo EXIF info) withmdls
. - Be aware macOS is based on BSD Unix, and many commands (for example
ps
,ls
,tail
,awk
,sed
) have many subtle variations from Linux, which is largely influenced by System V-style Unix and GNU tools. You can often tell the difference by noting a man page has the heading "BSD General Commands Manual." In some cases GNU versions can be installed, too (such asgawk
andgsed
for GNU awk and sed). If writing cross-platform Bash scripts, avoid such commands (for example, consider Python orperl
) or test carefully. - To get macOS release information, use
sw_vers
.
Windows only
These items are relevant only on Windows.
Ways to obtain Unix tools under Windows
- Access the power of the Unix shell under Microsoft Windows by installing Cygwin. Most of the things described in this document will work out of the box.
- On Windows 10, you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which provides a familiar Bash environment with Unix command line utilities.
- If you mainly want to use GNU developer tools (such as GCC) on Windows, consider MinGW and its MSYS package, which provides utilities such as bash, gawk, make and grep. MSYS doesn't have all the features compared to Cygwin. MinGW is particularly useful for creating native Windows ports of Unix tools.
- Another option to get Unix look and feel under Windows is Cash. Note that only very few Unix commands and command-line options are available in this environment.
Useful Windows command-line tools
- You can perform and script most Windows system administration tasks from the command line by learning and using
wmic
. - Native command-line Windows networking tools you may find useful include
ping
,ipconfig
,tracert
, andnetstat
. - You can perform many useful Windows tasks by invoking the
Rundll32
command.
Cygwin tips and tricks
- Install additional Unix programs with the Cygwin's package manager.
- Use
mintty
as your command-line window. - Access the Windows clipboard through `/dev/cl
- Run
cygstart
to open an arbitrary file through its registered application. - Access the Windows registry with
regtool
. - Note that a
C:\
Windows drive path becomes/cygdrive/c
under Cygwin, and that Cygwin's/
appears underC:\cygwin
on Windows. Convert between Cygwin and Windows-style file paths withcygpath
. This is most useful in scripts that invoke Windows programs.
More resources
- awesome-shell: A curated list of shell tools and resources.
- awesome-osx-command-line: A more in-depth guide for the macOS command line.
- Strict mode for writing better shell scripts.
- shellcheck: A shell script static analysis tool. Essentially, lint for bash/sh/zsh.
- Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: The sadly complex minutiae on how to handle filenames correctly in shell scripts.
- Data Science at the Command Line: More commands and tools helpful for doing data science, from the book of the same name