This is really good. Clear and well laid out.
The only thing that might confuse some beginners is your specific choice of package manager.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
This is really good. Clear and well laid out.
The only thing that might confuse some beginners is your specific choice of package manager.
I added more information to the installing software section, updated section title to specify Arch Linux, and added another section for Debian and Derivatives.
You're awesome.
Interesting compilation, there is cheat.sh, tldr and others though
I made this just as much for me as I did for others. Writing things down myself really helps me memorize them.
Nice work.
My tiny nitpick is that "touch" will create the file you specify if it doesn't exist. I've seen this usage a lot, so your example may benefit from mentioning it.
TIL „touch“ has other uses than creating a file
Thanks for all the feedback! I'm much happier with it now, and I'll probably continue to make small changes over time.
I find the references to file extension kinda confusing. Extensions mean a lot less in Linux cli, but I can tell youre just using them for examples. Maybe give more concrete examples instead.
ls *.sh
to list all the files ending in .sh
I updated various examples, and replaced with in most places and removed it from the legend.
I don't know how this would be useful to someone reading the cheat sheet, but here's something interesting I just indirectly found out while skimming it through:
Ctrl+D
does the same thing as ENTER
, except the latter additionally sends the end-of-line character to the reader while the former sends nothing;
as is the case for shells or interactive programs like the Python REPL, Ctrl+D
causes them to terminate only because it sends a string that is 0 characters long, and 0-size reads are universally interpreted as files reaching the end.
To test this: enter cat
, type "hello" without pressing enter, then Ctrl+D
: you should see "hellohello".
An extremely rare case of this being useful would be using netcat to send a string somewhere, without sending the end-of-line byte at the end.
I updated "Log out" to "Exit (sends a signal indicating the end of a text stream)". Which I think is a lot more accurate, and still easy to understand.
Cool, thank you!
Oh. My. Gosh. I love this. Thank you. And thank you for being --verbose
about the provenance and history of the document. And big big thank yous for the Internet Archive links. Bravo.
What do you mean about "/ root directory, eg /usr/bin/bash"? / is /, just the top-most directory
Yes, the top most directory, /, is the root directory.
Each directory is a branch in one giant tree structure. For example, if you have a directory containing two other directories, that is a branch that is splitting into two branches. All directories are descendants of the same root.
I added more detail to the description and made a more relevant example. (I think)
would you upload this on github?
Done? I've never uploaded to GitHub before, and I was just doing what I thought I should do. I'll do my best to keep it updated with the version on my website.
https://github.com/ordinarybyte/linux_cheat_sheet
Is there a way to make GitHub automatically detect changes to the file at cerium.cc and update the repo? Or do they not allow that? I know a scheduled script would be able to work but I don't really want to have to run it myself.
Usually you would go the other way around. Merge changes into git and then distribute from there.
You can do some automation with GitHub Actions, but I have no idea if it can do specifically that
You might consider putting a license on it
I've been using Linux for decades and I bet that'll still come in handy.
cd -
changes to the previous directory
Does cd +
work to go forward after using cd -
?
cd -
negates cd -
, so you're right back where you started! It's like multiplying 2 negatives.
This is fantastic. Just at a glance I already learned something new! Definitely keeping this for reference.
Aren't Alt + Backspace
, and Alt + Arrow Key Left/Right
also terminal shortcuts?
I like your version, I am bookmarking it.
This is really nice!
This is really helpful, thank you.
Really cool!
Another good addition to this might be some script rudiments, like how to write and run simple .sh
files
^S - stop terminal IO
^Q - resume terminal IO (if your terminal looks frozen, this is the one to try)
alt-b, alt-f - jump back/forward one word
You're a prince among men.
And an Albert among princes.
A little over a decade & a half and I find that very useful. Should have GPG in for reading signatures on software and such too. If you'd like I can contribute to GPG terminal as I've been using it for a good portion of that time.
I owe you bigly
I've needed something like this for a while, thank you buddy
Awesome! Thank you kindly
Great idea. I'll keep this handy from now on.
At the end, in redirection, <<
: that's not how here-documents work. The example gives the impression it will read the given file up until "STOP", but in reality the shell expects you to keep writing your here-doc until you write "STOP" and then feeds it to the program as if it were all on stdin. I don't think wc even does anything with the stdin if you give it a filename...
Note that variable expansion will happen in here-docs, so it's a bit different than a simple cat
.
Also look into here-strings. And process substitution, I find that quite handy.