Linux-Unix cheat sheets - The ultimate collection >> Scott Klarr

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Linux-Unix cheat sheets - The ultimate collection

Posted By Scott Klarr on Feb 07, 2008 at 6:15 am

Linux Command Line Cheat Sheets

Solaris Cheat Sheets

IBM (AIX) Cheat Sheets

Debian/Ubuntu Cheat Sheets

Package Management Cheat Sheets

Unix Cheat Sheets

Bash Cheat Sheets

Awk Cheat Sheets

Ed Cheat Sheets

Sed Cheat Sheets

GDB debugger Cheat Sheets

Other *nix Related Cheat Sheets

18 SheetsEmacs cheat sheets
12 SheetsVi & Vim cheat sheets

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Comments (70)

ever so gratefull - Jun 24, 2008

As a beginner this is exactly what I need, Scott many thanks.
You rock Dude!

Jonathan Franzone - Jun 05, 2008

Awesome list! Thank you very much for compiling this.

Slarty Bartfast - May 05, 2008

Awesome show, great job!

ATOzTOA - Feb 27, 2008

Great work! I didn't know there were this much cheat sheets, lol :)

charles goodall - Feb 27, 2008

Well you certainly attracted some interest on this Digg. So glad to have this hard-working resource.

Ok then: what is the problem with people who need to stand tall for their chosen OS?

I have been using pc's, and a whole lot of Apples until coming to Linux. Thousands of personal computers. The coffee talk is nearly always about "which is better?". The question may be said as "which is best for me and my purposes?".

Simple. No politics. No grand-standing, and no logo evangelism whatever. After a lot of thought I have decided that all this hand-wringing and chicken talk is just a waste of time.

Why not just do your homework, make your choice, prove it to yourself, commit to it, and enjoy your choice. Let others enjoy theirs. Done. There. Get over it.

uxp - Feb 26, 2008

"(Really, Bash/Zsh are FAR better then the OS X terminal or the windows Command Prompt)" Actually, Terminal.app in OS X is configured to run the BASH shell... really.

[code]
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$
[/code]

Raj - Feb 25, 2008

Awesome! This is exactly what I was looking for. I needed to find a command that would allow me to find out who was going over their disk space quota on our local storage server. Thanks to this I found exactly what I needed. Also managed to log the amount of bandwidth each client was using, and regulate accordingly. All of this through the awesome power of the Linux Command Line. Would be nice if you could list the commands that are still in use; some are outdated and are not used anymore, well, at least on modern Linux systems.

Peteris Krumins - Feb 18, 2008

oops, I think I made a mistake and added an HTML comment to my previous command about the new bash history cheat sheet I just made.

The URL of the article and cheat sheet is:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-bash-command-line-history/

Sincerely,
peter

Peteris Krumins - Feb 18, 2008

Hi! I am writing to you again :)

I just wrote a post on working efficiently with bash command line history.

I titled the article "The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History".

It starts by reviewing the keyboard shortcuts for history retrieval in emacs and vi editing modes, then it covers the commands for listing and erasing the history, then it goes into discussing history expansion mechanism - event designators, word designators and their modifiers. Finally the guide lists variables and options to modify the default history behavior.

It comes with cheat sheets in PDF, Plain Text ASCII (.TXT) and LaTeX formats.

Sincerely,
Peteris Krumins

Eric Jackson - Feb 18, 2008

Thanks for the cheats.
The comments from Mac and Window users are interesting. Yes, linux, just like Windows and just like OSX has a command line. OSX is based on Unix as is linux. In a new linux system, I don't have to use the command line any more than Windows or OSX users do. I can use a GUI. It's said that power users often find the command line to be more useful than a Gui. I used the command line last a few weeks ago to issue the command SSh. There are programs that will do that using a GUI too. I just chose to try something, experiment a little.

My guess is that there are cheat sheets for people with OSx and Windows on their machines but since many only want to use the GUI they aren't as well publicized. Linux users use the GUI generally because they want to, not because they have to.

I owned an Amiga 2000 and an Amiga 4000. I used the GUI most of the time but sometimes I used the CLI.

hddstudio - Feb 18, 2008

Just a Linux user wannabe :D

Dan Fekete - Feb 18, 2008

beejay54 -
"Has anyone ever come across a sheet that lists what the folders are for? eg... /etc/ /home/ /var/ and so on? Such as... etc = configuration files"

What you're looking for is the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). You can google it or check these links out:

For a quick overview:
http://www.remote-dba.net/t_linux_33_system_fhs_scripts.htm

The whole thing:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

Robert - Feb 14, 2008

Wow! What a fantastic resource. Some of these cheat sheets will come in very handy.

sumanth krishna - Feb 12, 2008

Thanks for the exhaustive list :)

Kurtlar Vadisi Pusu - Feb 12, 2008

Great archive! Reference Source

Planet Lowyat - Feb 12, 2008

I know some list are outdated but yet another great lists.

sad - Feb 11, 2008

http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml

Old techie - Feb 11, 2008

Intelligent technicians and computer users choose the smart and efficient tools for the tasks at hand.

Anyone who wastes time name calling instead of simply seeking knowledge to use their chosen tools optimally is neither intelligent nor thrifty, and is to be ignored as such.

If one likes Mac OS, fine! If one uses GNU/Linux because it is Open Source, practical, efficient, and FREE, well, isn't that both intelligent, and thrifty?

KrazyKorean - Feb 11, 2008

wow awesome..

NickD - Feb 11, 2008

Wow... the ignorance of Windows/Mac users in so many of these comments...

Great collection btw :)

Digg > floatingpoints - Feb 11, 2008

What, did we decide that labeling images is bad now or something?

I have no idea what I'm clicking on, and I'm not clicking on 69 individual images to see what they are.

Digg > booknow - Feb 11, 2008

Thanks. Really useful.

Digg > raseel - Feb 11, 2008

It's fascinating to know that you still find new bash commands after working on linux for more than three years.

Chanux - Feb 10, 2008

It's not just Linux you need to say. It's GNU Linux.

Digg > weebit - Feb 09, 2008

see it's good stuff like this that digg users always look forward too. :)

Thanks!

Digg > marx2k - Feb 09, 2008

This will be great for my girlfriend. She has no problem using Linux on her laptop but sometimes she does ask me for command line help and almost each of these addresses one problem or another that she has (like moving entire directories at once).

Very good resource. Bookmarked.

Artem Russakovskii - Feb 09, 2008

Great collection.

Btw, in the first cheatsheet, fsck is misspelled as fcsk.

Digg > beejay54 - Feb 09, 2008

Has anyone ever come across a sheet that lists what the folders are for? eg... /etc/ /home/ /var/ and so on? Such as... etc = configuration files

Digg > stinkypyper - Feb 09, 2008

Is there not one cheat sheet to rule them all.

Digg > ImmortalLegend - Feb 09, 2008

"Democracy"

ANARCHY-TV.COM - Feb 09, 2008

This is exactly why I abandoned Linux and stopped advocating of Linux. As a diabetic, its maddeningly impossible to remember even the name of many of these obtuse commands, just to be able look them up when you do need them. And if you do know them, forget the maddening man pages which provide next to no examples of the actual most common uses of the command.

Just look at the sheets required to use a wordprocessor... VI in this case... all I can remember is basically how to get into insert mode, make my changes, and quit... all requiring a rather bizarre sequence. In Windows, all you do is open up Wordpad. And you don't need a cheat sheet to do it.

Non intuitive and poorly designed... just like this site. Case in point: try like I did to save all 69 cheat sheets. There is not a single link to download them all... instead you have to click every single link and do a save as. Oh, it gets even worse: at least 12 of them are all named the same "Linux cheat sheet"! They are hobbled together, like Linux, from all across the net and multiple authors, so there is no uniform convention in naming them either, so that when they are all saved into the same folder, they will make sense.

To be a Linux administrator, must be a maddeningly stressful job indeed. When it runs right, oh, you can extol its virtues from here to kingdom come. But when it breaks, or you have to configure something new you've never done before, oh god, the horror trying to pour through Linux How To's and thousands of posts across the net of people who have been in the same pickle.

Digg > ism70605 - Feb 09, 2008

People really need to learn the command xargs. It is great to do fairly simple but large tasks. I personally find it useful for injecting the stdin into the second or third arguments of a command.

Digg > ZephyrNinety - Feb 09, 2008

What the fuck is "Bindows" supposed to even mean?

Digg > frontporsche - Feb 09, 2008

I like these cheat sheets. ... not for use as cheat sheets, but to scan through and look for important commands and options you might not be familiar with.

Digg > SQLserver - Feb 09, 2008

It seems that many Vista/OS X losers are coming here and saying:
"LOL YOU NEED TO TYPE COMMANDS AND HAVE CHEAT SHEET IN LINSUX LOL"

What they simply don't understand, is that in a modern Desktop Linux, you rarely will have to use the command line to do FAR more then in OS X or Vista.
I'd like to see how much these people know about THEIR Terminals, and have them explain why THEIR terminals are soo much easy.
(Really, Bash/Zsh are FAR better then the OS X terminal or the windows Command Prompt)

Digg > oddstar - Feb 09, 2008

wow this is awesome, I'll give these to friends

Joey - Feb 09, 2008

I don't need any cheat sheets for windows.

Digg > radiantarchon - Feb 09, 2008

im kind of wary to use anything that would require a bunch cheat sheets. if one cant figure important things out by just looking around its probably not for the average person

Digg > mrbambastik - Feb 09, 2008

69, this covers everything, from head to tail!

Digg > momsshizzle - Feb 09, 2008

Not as good as Vista. Linsux.

Digg > Pedlya - Feb 09, 2008

Dugg for 69.

Digg > dazealex - Feb 09, 2008

Frickin' eh. This is what I needed.

OS X - Feb 09, 2008

I hope the Apple losers do stick to OS X and paying for their glorified service packs and DRM...personally I'd rather not have the bunch of freaks polluting the Linux community with their presence.

Bunch of faggots.

Syahid A. - Feb 09, 2008

What is cooler than a cheatsheet?
A cheatsheet collection.
Freakingly awesome dude.

Digg > ggko - Feb 09, 2008

Nearly 70 of these... umm, anyone have a cheat sheet for the cheat sheets?

Dave - Feb 09, 2008

I just thought of another good one:

You have a large collection of images with various extensions such as .jpg, .jpeg, .JPG, .png, .PNG, .gif, .GIF, .bmp, .BMP and some that are named .jpg even though they are actually .bmp files because clueless Windows users think they can change the file type by changing the extension.

You want to normalise your entire collection and fix the extensions to be correct for the file type. In a GUI, this would take weeks, on the command line this would take four separate commands, one for each file type, the first of which would take about a minute to write and the rest would simply be copy-and-paste versions of the first. After that, another similar command that simply compares the file type with the extension and renames if necessary. The whole process could be finished in three minutes.

Digg > dealseeker - Feb 09, 2008

So aggregating Google search results into a big list counts as ... something?

Dave - Feb 09, 2008

I'm a Mac nerd and a Unix sysadmin by profession and there's a couple of things I'd like to say here.

Firstly, pretty much every command I have seen in the cheatsheets I looked at will work on a Mac. Mac OS X has a very pretty GUI but the power and precision is there hiding underneath as soon as you need it.

Secondly, you don't need reams of cheatsheets to perform simple tasks. The tasks that most of the people I work with use would fit on half a sheet of paper and you wouldn't have to use the sheet after an hour's usage. Complex tasks, on the other hand, are a different matter. I was trying to think of something you can't do in the GUI and, thanks to spotlight, there really isn't very much left.

The two things I came up with highlight the main two reasons for using the command line: precision and power.

With spotlight, I could find references to a particular image in all the html files in my website and open them up for editing. With BBEdit, I could do the same thing but automatically change the image name to its new name. But with a command line I can find all references to this image that are not already wrapped in a link and change both the image to be its thumbnail version and the link to point to the full-sized version or I can add a new link all in one command.

The second is a task that I had to perform last week and would have taken me all week in a GUI. Someone (or a piece of malfunctioning software) had deleted a few of the original sized images from a gallery but left the mid-sized images, the thumbnails and all the references to the missing files in place. I wrote a command that would print out a list of all the missing filenames and I can't think of a way of doing that in a GUI that would be quicker than several hours.

The greatest power of the command line is in chaining commands together. Practically every day I end up analysing an Apache log file, looking for some pattern that could explain what is happening. Sometimes I want to find the IP addressses with the most requests (cut -d' ' -f1 access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n) or I want to find all of the pages that returned 304 response codes (awk '$9 ~ /304/ {print $7}' access_log | sort | uniq) or I want to add up all of the bandwidth used by various different pages and list the top twenty (for PAGE in `cut -d' ' -f7 access_log | sort | uniq`; do awk -v PAGE=$PAGE 'BEGIN {SUM=0} $7 ~ /PAGE/ {SUM=SUM $10} END {PRINT SUM,PAGE}'; done | sort -n | head -20)

Digg > karolisonline - Feb 09, 2008

I don't think 69 is appropriate number for linux topic, if You get what I mean.

Digg > jesusxenu - Feb 09, 2008

69 eh? I see what you did there

Digg > Remmy - Feb 09, 2008

You know what I don't get? Why people complain or make fun of the command line. What's wrong with getting to know your Operating System better? It saves you loads of time and saves technical support or communities from bashing their heads in with a keyboard.

Digg > stinkystunk - Feb 09, 2008

good linux cheat sheets here: http://www.raygoldmodels.com

Digg > Alex2 - Feb 09, 2008

It's the 21'st century. You're supposed to be able to just talk to your computer.

OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS!!

Digg > rlbond86 - Feb 09, 2008

Maybe the Ubuntu noobs need these, I'll stick to a real distro where you can learn these yourself.

Peteris Krumins - Feb 08, 2008

Hey! There are a few you missed on my page, again :)

I made screen terminal vt100 emulator cheat sheet:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/screen-terminal-emulator-cheat-sheet/

Bash vi and emacs editing mode cheat sheets (working on command line):
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet/
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-emacs-editing-mode-cheat-sheet/

PS. you made a mistake in sed's cheat sheet. You linked to my Ed cheat sheet.

Can you correct that link and point it to http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-stream-editor-cheat-sheet/

Thank you,
peter@catonmat

Robin - Feb 08, 2008

Sure, Mac users can drag and drop at a snails pace but with some of these tools, you can make major changes before a Mac or Windows user gets the edit window open on one document.

These are for power users, not those that use all the various drag and drop tools that are in the various Linux desktops.

I thank you for these links.

max lustig - Feb 08, 2008

really great compilation!

Tristan - Feb 08, 2008

good collections!

Digg > oobuntu - Feb 08, 2008

hopefully one of these chaps with loads of time on their hands will aggregate all this great stuff into one 20 page ultimate crib sheet PDF (lots of commands are duplicates and some commands are so old fashioned they are never used any more.....)

Digg > iwilldigg - Feb 08, 2008

ls - listed all the cheatsheets
cp - copied to my local drive
lpr - printed all the important ones

Digg > encrypteduser - Feb 08, 2008

pft, we know all of the commands already. ;)

Digg > stutimandal - Feb 08, 2008

Apple Fanboys! Please don't read linux threads if you find it useless.

Digg > chingy1788 - Feb 08, 2008

Thats the scary part of Linux

Digg > stutimandal - Feb 07, 2008

I just finished installing Ubuntu 7.10 and I am slowly migrating from Bindows XP. Thank you!

Digg > mooseontheloose - Feb 07, 2008

Wow, awesome. You linux nerds need reams of pages worth of cheat sheets to do the most basic tasks. I'll stick to OSX, thanks.

Digg > Menekali - Feb 07, 2008

"Buried because 69 IS A MOUTHFUL"

Are you kidding me?

Digg > flashedback - Feb 07, 2008

Buried because 69 IS A MOUTHFUL

Digg > olbap - Feb 07, 2008

Thank you very much for this. As a new Linux user, this information is greatly appreciated!

honk - Feb 07, 2008

Nice! But could you recommend the 3 best ones? I have no time to go through all of those.

Pádraig Brady - Feb 07, 2008

Hi, could you remove the reference to the
notebind .com site in the "Linux Command Line Cheat Sheets" as it's just an
out of date screen shot of the info at
http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html
(which you already have referenced).

thanks!
Pádraig.

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