Time-saving tips for Linux

http://www.quora.com/Linux/What-are-some-time-saving-tips-that-every-Linux-user-should-know

by thenicepostr • 15 years ago

242 85 15 years ago

DerekH• 15 years ago

It's great seeing all of these commands and shortcuts, and seeing that you know a lot of them. These never cease to be useful.

Even though it seems simple to someone who knows Linux, you can always impress marketing/business people by flying through Linux with these helpful commands, shortcuts, and tips.

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

You've got bigger issues if you've got marketing people looking over your shoulder while you're looking through grep's output. (And I doubt they care much about your Linux wizardry, that's why they're in marketing.)

doctororange• 15 years ago

The learning curve of vim was pretty steep, but once over the hump you get some massive benefits. That said, I bet I'm only using 1% of the available commands.

Going back to Windows makes you really appreciate the speed of bash, vim and grep.

baha_man2• 15 years ago

"Going back to Windows makes you really appreciate the speed of bash, vim and grep."

When I have to use Windows, one of the first things I always do is to install cygwin, so I can use bash, grep, etc.

klochner2• 15 years ago

I used cygwin for several years and always felt like a leper - nothing ever works right out of the box.

gkatsev2• 15 years ago

You don't need to give up vim and grep on windows. gVim works great and since vim has the built-in vimgrep command, you can use that. You do lose the awesomeness of a shell like bash or zsh.

dhimes• 15 years ago

Thanks for vimgrep. I didn't know about that.

baha_man2• 15 years ago

"In bash, use Ctrl-R to search through command history."

Or, add these lines to your .bashrc to use Ctrl-p and Ctrl-n:

bind "\C-p":history-search-backward

bind "\C-n":history-search-forward

jrockway3• 15 years ago

Why? C-r and C-s already do each of these, and C-p and C-n are for going back and forward in history. (Personally, I use M-p and M-n so that bash in the terminal works like Emacs.)

eeperson• 15 years ago

Doessn't that just do the same thing as the built-in Ctrl-r and Ctrl-s? Also, Ctrl-p and Ctrl-n are already used to cycle through previous commands.

spudlyo4• 15 years ago

You usually can't use C-s because it's bound to stop.

$ stty stop undef

jrockway3• 15 years ago

I don't think these tips are that great. Some random criticisms:

ifconfig is deprecated (use "ip" instead).

There is not much value in knowing vim if you know Emacs. If you want to edit something in your terminal, well, emacsclient -t to your Emacs session. Or use mg, which is a very fast and light Emacs workalike -- just enough for editing your /etc/apt/sources.list to get Emacs installed :)

spudlyo4• 15 years ago

You can also use nano, which has similar key bindings and is often installed by default, which will do in a pinch until you can install emacs.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

Personally, not a fan... but at least it's the default on Debian.

wazoox• 15 years ago

I hate nano with passion. The key bindings makes absolutely no fscking sense and resemble nothing else. Just learn vi and emacs basics.

zerokyuu• 15 years ago

At first I thought you meant "use 'ipconfig' instead" and I was like, "Whaaaaat?!". Then I checked the man page for "ip". Thank you. It looks rather useful. I don't mess with routing or devices too much but I have in the past and only knew about ifconfig.

jrussbowman2• 15 years ago

Functionally as a sysadmin, I've heard ifconfig is deprecated before yet I've never used ip. just 'ifconfig' on the command line tells me everything I need to know about what interfaces are up, their status and basic info.

'ip' just gives me the standard syntax description.

The power of the basic shell is that there's usually a few hundred ways to skin a cat. And just because there's documentation saying something is deprecated as often as not it's still so widely used that in practice, it's not.

thwarted• 15 years ago

ifconfig doesn't show the additional IPs on an interface unless they are bound to aliased interface names (eth0:0)

veritgo• 15 years ago

ifconfig is deprecated, so probably a good idea to get out of that habit. Particularly if you are using it in scripts.

'ip addr' should give you all the information that 'ifconfig' does. You can also make the output a little less chatty by doing 'ip -o -4 addr' to get IPv4 addresses on one line per interface, or 'ip -o -0 addr' to get MAC addresses displayed similarly. This can make awking / cutting for addresses to use in scripts a little more elegant.

philjr• 15 years ago

ip accepts shortened versions of it's commands e.g.

    ip a

can be used instead of

    ip addr

Even shorter than ifconfig!

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

You don't think these tip are that great for you. But they're not written for Unix command-line ninjas. They're written for average users (like me) who run Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux and just use the basic commands. I bookmarked the tips and will definitely be revisiting them regularly to improve my command line fu.

Sorry you didn't get anything out of it, but I suspect you don't need tips like "learn vim" and "be familiar with chown".

angusgr• 15 years ago

Or use mg, which is a very fast and light Emacs workalike

There's also zile, another mini-emacs (great if you run Linux on small embedded computers.) I haven't used mg yet, so I don't know how they stack up against each other.

I do have a creeping feeling I should some day bite the bullet and learn more than 4 vi commands, though.

angus77• 15 years ago

When I want emacs to be fast & light I just do emacs -Q.

X-Istence3• 15 years ago

Wait, what? ifconfig is deprecated? Now I need to start typing ip on Linux , yet another variation from my BSD machines where ifconfig is definitely still in use, and Windows where I have to use ipconfig.

vacri• 15 years ago

'ip' does a hell of a lot more than just list devices. It's really worth learning how to use it.

you also don't need root rights to use it for display - although ifconfig can be run as a regular user, it's not on the path by default so it usually won't show up.

geoka92• 15 years ago

I think you still need to be comfortable with basic vi commands as it is _the_ standard editor in Unix. Many a times I've found myself in situations when I had to quick-edit a config file on a new bare-bones server with only vi installed.

As for the quick Emacs workalikes - they are exotic and you can't always be expected to know the packaging commands of the odd Unix system you happen to be working with. And sometimes installing new packages is not an option.

maweaver• 15 years ago

> ifconfig is deprecated

Deprecated by whom? Is there any source on this? Nothing is mentioned in the man page, and googling for it turns up a wikipedia article with a [citation needed], a reddit discussion from today linking to wikipedia, and this discussion.

ominous_prime4• 15 years ago

http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.iproute2.html#LARTC.IPROUTE2.WH...

ralphc• 15 years ago

Basic vi knowledge may not be needed if you only work in Linux, but in my job I can work on Linux, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX, and vi is the only editor that you can find on all of them in their base installs.

endlessvoid94• 15 years ago

I found out about ack awhile back -- it's like grep on steroids.

spudlyo4• 15 years ago

I'm a big fan of ack, I love the --output feature, which is super handy. Unfortunately it is hardly ever installed when I need it. It's considerably slower than the highly tuned GNU regex code, which only really matters when you're grepping through a ton of material.

gnosis2• 15 years ago

Could you give an example of something useful one could do with ack's --output feature?

The manual's a little light on the details.

All it says is:

  --output=expr
     Output the evaluation of expr for each line

What expression are they talking about? A regular expression? If so, how is that different from a normal grep?

slowpoison• 15 years ago

On Ubuntu, the package name is ack-grep. So use: sudo -i aptitude install ack-grep

Don't go for ack, which is some Kanji character converter.

ilcavero2• 15 years ago

"Learn what the number inside something like ls(1) or perror(3) means." you got me there, I don't know what it means and now I'm curious and can't find it on google

ominous_prime4• 15 years ago

They're the man page sections. When something appears in more than one category, you need to specify the section in the `man` command.

  $ man 1 ls
  $ man 3 perror
  $ man 1 printf
  $ man 3 printf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

ilcavero2• 15 years ago

Thanks, quite frustrating not having any keyword that allows you to google something

more info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

pieceofpeace• 15 years ago

You can also do this:

  $ man man

jeberle2• 15 years ago

It's odd that his 2nd tip is "Learn Vim" and then goes on to describe all the bash/readline keystrokes in Emacs mode.

  $ set -o vi

callahad• 15 years ago

I always found modal editing most valuable when editing and navigating through large bodies of text. I'm not quite sure that it makes sense on the command line, where you're rarely dealing with more than a few lines of text, and seldom need to rearrange those particular lines.

Nevertheless, I switched to zsh on Sunday, and with it, vi keybindings. It's getting better, but it still doesn't feel quite right.

tednaleid• 15 years ago

I agree. I'm a vim user and never took to emacs, but the non-modal "emacs" keybindings feel more natural on the command line.

spudlyo4• 15 years ago

Do you know anyone who actually does this? Even die-hard vi folks I know can't get used to modes on the command line.

mcantor• 15 years ago

I use vim almost pathologically, but I gave up on set -o vi. Since there's no visual indicator of which mode you're in, it's easy to make confusing mistakes and not the right feedback. It just wasn't worth it.

staunch• 15 years ago

I always use set -o vi. It's in all my .bashrc files. Wish every CLI had it.

jeberle2• 15 years ago

I can only speak for myself. Give it a day or two, and it will quickly become as transparent as your editing sessions. Once you cut over, you can forget about chording and arrow keys. Just one key: <Esc>.

gnosis2• 15 years ago

I use vi mode in my shell all the time, and love it. It only took a day or so to get used to it. But then again, I am a die-hard vim user.

What I'd really like, though, would be a vim mode for the shell, not just a vi mode. Then I could use some of vim's more advanced features, which would make the mode even more useful.

mro• 15 years ago

For about a year or two, I've had set -o vi in my .bashrc. It is just so much easier when you work in Vim more than half the time!

The modes still trip me up sometimes, but a quick <Esc> or <Ctrl+c> fixes that!

clvv2• 15 years ago

I found myself using Emacs keybinding for line wise operation and movement in both vim and shell. It is just verbose to switch between editing modes sometimes.

travisglines2• 15 years ago

When first stumbling my way around the shell, after learning about tab completion I discovered the magic wizardry that is command reverse/history lookup (cntrl-r start typing command ... see last command you entered that matches)

maw• 15 years ago

Yep, very handy. After finding a match, you can hit C-r again to find earlier matches.

travisglines2• 15 years ago

I think you can keep hitting the up arrow to find earlier matches too

klochner2• 15 years ago

quora appears broken at the moment . . . I was going to suggest:

in many shells (bash, tcsh, etc), !foo will execute the most recent command from your history that matches foo, for example:

   > grep -lots -of -options /complicated_regex/ ./some/path/* | /pipe/filter
   # realize you are in the wrong directory
   > cd /the/right/directory
   > !g

and similarly, !! is the most recent command, which comes in handy for "sudo !!"[1]

[1] http://xkcd.com/149/

clvv2• 15 years ago

Another trick that I don't see people mention(excuse me if somebody here already did) is the bash history completion:

\esc \tab

This will complete based on your history, argument wise. Very useful when tab completion itself doesn't satisfy you.

xelfer• 15 years ago

The 'learn bash, it's available everywhere' really bit me when I moved from being a Linux Sysadmin to an AIX Sysadmin. Only ksh is available in this case. It took quite a few months to get used to.

wladimir• 15 years ago

Tell me about it. I've always worked with Linux, so was used to bash and its conveniences. Then I got a job where they use ancient Solaris systems with csh. Luckily, tcsh is generally installed which at least supports command line completion (after having to start it manually), otherwise I'd go mad.

jdabney• 15 years ago

Same thing happened to me a few years ago with Solaris and Irix. I used to use bash but the best shell available at work was tcsh. Now I have so much invested in tcsh that it is difficult to change back.

there3• 15 years ago

Turn on sudo(8)'s "NOPASSWD" option for yourself (see sudoers(5)).

don't do that. if anything, lock it down even more by enabling tty_tickets.

wtallis• 15 years ago

I wouldn't use NOPASSWD on a server or laptop, but for my personal workstation, security isn't as important as ease of use.

You can't make good security guidelines without regard for context.

nupark3• 15 years ago

Why not? My servers have no passwords at all -- they either use SSH keys or kerberos.

Once you have access to a local shell, the game is over. Acquiring root is easy, between local exploits or simply piggybacking on (or sniffing) a valid, passworded sudo login.

there3• 15 years ago

Once you have access to a local shell, the game is over. Acquiring root is easy, between local exploits

uh, maybe you should work on that.

geoka92• 15 years ago

If you are halfway through typing a command but change your mind, hit Ctrl-A, add a # at the beginning to make it a comment, and press enter. You can then return to it later via command history.

A faster way would be to hit Alt-# (does the same thing with just one key combo).

steve-howard• 15 years ago

ctrl-u/ctrl-y is good if you only want to do that for one thing at a time.

munchhausen• 15 years ago

One thing that's definitely missing from that list is the "undo" feature of bash which is bound to Ctrl-/ by default. It reverts the last edit you did on the command line. (The keybinding invokes the undo action also in emacs.)

known• 15 years ago

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ also have some good tips

dreur• 15 years ago

One thing to say: http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml It has everything I ever needed. When something is missing send patch.

bingaman• 15 years ago

Quick ssh and and start screen:

  function s() { ssh $1 -t screen -dRR }

Time-saving tips for Linux

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