Unlocking Linux CLI Mastery Essential Tips and Tricks

A single dash normally means a short name of the flag. E.g ls -a

A double dash is passed to express a long flag. Ex: ls --all

A single dash can also handle multiple short flags passed into it. Ex. ls -alR

Use the command less <filename> to output less information of a file

Use the command more <filename to output more information if a file

Use key Ctrl + A to go to the beginning of any written text in bash

Use key ctrl+ E to go to the end of any written text in bash that is currently present.

Use key ctrl +d to send a sign to terminate, use the command kill -l to see all commands that can be used to kill, terminate, interrupt processes, and many more.

When we press key ctrl +r then it will help us to go through history and find the matching last command. If we want to go through all matching command then keep pressing ctrl +r

tail helps us to see the last 10 lines of content from the source and the head can show us the first 10 lines. Seeing 10 lines is configurable and we can see the -f flag to not let the command exit and just keep showing us the update.

mkdir -p /nested/folder/can/be/created mkdir is used to create a folder but if we try to create nested then we will see some error just pass -p flag to make a nested folder in a single line of command

There’s a cli lib trash which can help us to manage trash via CLI. For example: trash-put filename

tar -cf pkg.tar package.json package-lock.json to archive file pkg.tar here can be any desired output filename and the rest of the files after it is to be archived inside it. To compress it change flag -cf to -cfz and also change the extension of the output filename to .tar.gz. This will actually compress our file and we can see some difference in size.

To unarchive any tar file just do this tar -xzf filena.tar.gz destinationFolder.