Linux-Unix cheat sheets - The ultimate collection

Posted On Feb 07, 2008 at 6:15 am

This is a compilation of approx 70 cheat sheets for Linux users. There are a grip load of commands that Linux users have at hand which can seem very daunting to a novice. This collection will make Linux just a little less of a headache to learn.

Suggestion: Look through all of them and then choose the top 5-10 you think will help you the most. Print them out and then get creative. You can laminate and hang them on the wall around your desk, or create a small binder that you always keep in reach. Or you can use them all for inspiration to create your own master sheet that suites you best. If you do make your own, put it online and post the link in the comments - You'll get a lot of free traffic from here!

Linux Command Line Cheat Sheets

Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet

Solaris Cheat Sheets

Solaris Cheat Sheet Solaris Cheat Sheet

IBM (AIX) Cheat Sheets

AIX Cheat Sheet AIX APV Cheat Sheet

Debian/Ubuntu Cheat Sheets

Debian/Ubuntu Cheat Sheet Debian/Ubuntu Cheat Sheet Debian/Ubuntu Cheat Sheet

Package Management Cheat Sheets

Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet Linux Cheat Sheet

Unix Cheat Sheets

Linux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet Unux Cheat Sheet

Bash Cheat Sheets

Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet Linux Bash Cheat Sheet

Awk Cheat Sheets

Awk Cheat Sheet Awk Cheat Sheet Awk Cheat Sheet Awk Cheat Sheet Awk Cheat Sheet Awk Cheat Sheet

Ed Cheat Sheets

Sed Cheat Sheet

Sed Cheat Sheets

Sed Cheat Sheet Sed Cheat Sheet

GDB debugger Cheat Sheets

GDB Debugger Cheat Sheet

Other *nix Related Cheat Sheets

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Comments (151)

Dave's Avatar

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)

ANARCHY-TV.COM's Avatar

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.

Slarty Bartfast's Avatar

Slarty Bartfast May 05, 2008

Awesome show, great job!

Ashish kumar's Avatar

Ashish kumar Dec 24, 2008

thanks

Saji N's Avatar

Saji N Sep 16, 2009

http://www.columbia.edu/~thl2102/linuxrefcard.pdf
This link is dead.

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