Starting out

Starter

du -hs * .[!.]* | sort -h
tar czf - $d | ssh kosh.aalto.fi 'cat > public_html/$d.tar.gz && chmod a+r $d.tar.gz'
find $d -type f \( ! -perm /g+w  -o -perm /o+w \) -exec chmod u+rwX,g+rwX,o-wx {} \;

A minimum to get started

Try them right away:

whoami (-or- id)
echo $SHELL
uname -a (-or- hostnamectl if available)
pwd
ls -lA
cd
date
grep searchword filename
cat filename

In combination with opeators > and | serves, plus text editor and a viewer like less, you should feel yourself safe already now.

For Aalto users: is your default shell a /bin/bash? Login to kosh/taltta and run chsh -s /bin/bash

Getting help in terminal

Before you Google for the command examples, try:

man command_name

Your best friend ever – man – collection of manuals. Type /search_word for searching through the man page, navigating between matches with n and shift + n, q for the exit.

Additionally, many, but not all, commands have a usage summary if run with ... --help or ... -h options.

File viewing / editing

cat filename
less filename  # 'q' to exit
nano filename  # Ctrl-x to exit

The most common commands

The ones we use in this tutorial, subjective:

man, cd, pwd, echo, whoami, id, hostname, bg, fg, jobs, cat, less, ps, kill, top, pgrep,
pstree, htop, du, cd, ls, mkdir, touch, ln, rm, cp, mv, mkdir, find, rsync, tar, scp, ssh,
alias, set, umask, export, date, clear, head, tail, wc, grep, sort, uniq, tr, diff, killall,
gzip, nano, xargs, chown, chmod, su, sudo, sleep, read, type, file, ping, ...

Plus shell programming language constructs adn control operators.

Important remark: not all of the external commands are available on all the systems. Even Linux distribution bundles may differ not speaking of the macOS setup and MS Windows packages.

Hint type -a to find binary location on the filesystem.

(*) Built-in and external commands

There are two types of commands:

shell built-in: cd, pwd, echo, alias, bg, set, umask etc.
external: ls, date, less, lpr, cat, etc.
some can be both: e.g. echo. Options not always the same!
For the most part, these behave similarly, which is a good thing! You don’t have to tell which is which.
echo: prints out echo something to type # types whatever you put after

Disable built-in command enable -n echo, after this /usr/bin/echo becomes a default instead of built-in echo