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crouse
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 Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2025 10:44 pm Post subject: Newbie's Top Ten Commands |
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Newbie's Top Ten Commands
http://www.cmm.uklinux.net/steve/ntt.html
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This is it, the Moment all you newbies have been waiting for, this is the list of the top ten commands that every new linux user should learn about to save time, effort and usenet flames. It is not intended to be a full description of the commands, rather it is a guide to the power of Gnu/Linux with some immediately accessible examples to try out (something that most technical documents omit, but which I believe are essential in getting the ideas involved into virgin skulls).
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lynch
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crouse
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JP
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DocZayus
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| Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2025 4:34 am Post subject: |
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nano and ls, thos really helped me in 1995...
the rest came afterwards.
Baby steps, one at a time...
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masinick
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| Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2025 4:58 am Post subject: Nano almost = Pico, look at Joe and Jed too |
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| JP wrote: | #7. RPM  not on my Debians, I won't  But I will use apt-get 
nano I use already (Thanks to crouse) but pico I'll have to study up on ... I used it a few years back for about two weeks, didn't like it and never used it again 
BTW, this is definitely bookmarked  |
Though Pico is the editor that comes with Pine (an easy to use console based Email program from the University of Washington) and Nano is a GNU based console text editor, the fact is that Nano was created to mimic Pico because the licensing terms for Pico were not considered "free", even though Pico is easily and freely available.
Debian based distros were among the first to adopt Nano to replace Pico.
If you find Nano easy to use, I am surprised you find Pico much different. They are VERY CLOSE to functionally identical, even though they share no code.
Nano is one of the easiest non graphical editors around.
Another editor that is a console based editor that has actually been around a while and is pretty easy to use is Joe. It is perhaps not quite as straightforward as Nano, but it is more capable than Nano and can mimic other editors. By default, it mimics WordStar, an ancient early MS/DOS editor in the early eighties. It can also mimic Emacs and Pico, (so in essence, it can look like Nano, too). To get that functionality, you call it up as jpico (or jemacs, jstar, or just plain joe).
Another editor that can take on similarly different bindings is Jed. Both Joe and Jed are named after their authors, Joseph Allen and John E. Davis, respectively. Jed can emulate Emacs or EDT, and probably other editors, too, but I am not sure which emulations besides these two have been written.
All of these are easy to use console editors (but Jed also comes in a graphical xjed form). |
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coastie
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JP
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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Location: South Portland, Maine, USA, Earth, Sol System
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2025 1:42 am Post subject: |
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ifconfig does, but if you are behind a NAT router you won't get your "live" IP.
If you know how to read it i think traceroute will give you your live ip. or you van go to "whatsmyip.com"
red be my IP (fudged for security reasons)
| Quote: | dragonfly@Sakura ~ $ /sbin/ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:e0:4d:2b:87:a6
inet addr:???.???.???.??? Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.224.0
inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:4dff:fe2b:87a6/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:18260 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2218 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3120664 (2.9 MiB) TX bytes:432315 (422.1 KiB)
Interrupt:60 Base address:0xe000
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:19603 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:19603 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2829335 (2.6 MiB) TX bytes:2829335 (2.6 MiB)
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jada
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2025 2:32 am Post subject: |
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| DocZayus wrote: | nano and ls, thos really helped me in 1995...
the rest came afterwards.
Baby steps, one at a time... |
I am out of # nano now. I make all with # vi |
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masinick
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Joined: 03 Apr 2025
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Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2025 2:56 am Post subject: |
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| jada wrote: | | DocZayus wrote: | nano and ls, thos really helped me in 1995...
the rest came afterwards.
Baby steps, one at a time... |
I am out of # nano now. I make all with # vi |
I use a wide variety of editing tools. In the UNIX, BSD, and Linux space, I have known ed and vi the longest, and I still use them from time to time. If I am using a script, I will use ed or sed. If I am using a console, I will use vi, Vim, Jed, Joe, or nano.
From the GUI, I use GNU Emacs the most, but I also use NEdit, Leafpad, Mousepad, Kate, and a wide variety of others. The classics, Vi and Emacs are the ones I still use the most though. |
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JP
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markrmcs
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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JP
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| Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2025 5:28 am Post subject: |
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Since the above link is no longer good, here's some more "Top Ten" resources (not necessarily just for newbies):
Top 10 Linux commands for Absolute Newbies Clik 
Linux / Unix top 10 Clik
Top Ten Curiously Useful Linux commands Clik
Top 10 Command Line Tools Clik
There's lots more, but I thought that if a link goes bad, there's always another to choose from. I thought this comment from someone's blog which no longer listed the top 10 (possibly another bad link) was a good one too:
| Uncle Dirtnap wrote: | I've been a senior unix sysadmin for over 10 years, and I always wonder who it is who writes these lists, and for whom they are intended.
hostname is the #1 command? It is unlikely you will need to change a machine's hostname more than once a year; it's very likely that the current hostname is part of the default system prompt.
cat /proc/interrupts is on the list, but not grep? That's not even a command.
See, in every list of this type I see get dugg, which must be 3 a week, the author fails to realize that the meat of the shell is compound commands -- loops, pipelines, etc.
Pretending for a minute that sed and awk are programming environments and don't count as commands, here are 10 that are infinitely more useful than whoami:
man: You're right about man -- man is the most important command to know (especially man -k)
grep: Global Regular Expression Print. Searches a file for a pattern (or absence of a pattern) and returns the lines that [don't] match.
cut: Since I was going to ignore awk, you need some way to get at columnar data.
find: Searches one or more file systems for objects matching a list of characteristics.
xargs: pass a list of arguments to a single command, one after the other.
loop built-ins: The for, each and while commands built in to most shells aren't just for scripting, they're great for one-off commands.
top: This is another one you definitely got right -- just know that, on a resource starved system (where you might want to run top,) top can be a bit of a hog.
ps: ...and your final correct answer -- I don't know how ps could be considered ghetto, though. Again, the "ghetto"ness off text based tools is a misassumption of people who don't use or understand compound commands.
test: test conditions and return true or false -- again, if you're really using the shell, and you're really doing enterprise work, you'll use this in ad-hoc commands every day.
ls: Seriously. You got ps, but ls is even more important (lists directory contents...)
...and that's to say nothing of sed, awk, nc, mknode, etc. |
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