author = Oliver Elphick [email protected]
topics = head, tail, grep, etc.
Latest update to this chapter: 14th December 1997
This chapter tells you how to run the basic commands that you need in order to use Debian Linux.
We assume that you have already logged in and are in a shell where you can enter commands. Refer back to Overview of a Debian GNU/Linux System, Chapter 2 for instructions on how to log in. If you are not running X-Windows, you will normally be put in an interactive shell as soon as you log in. If you are running X-Windows, you should refer to X Windows, Chapter 17 for instructions on how to start up a window with a shell.
The available shells are described in Shells, Chapter
5. All the examples given here assume that you are using the Bourne-Again
Shell, /bin/bash, though in most cases there will be no difference
between the command syntax for any shell. Bash is the default shell when
Debian Linux is first installed.
To run a command, type the command at the prompt, followed by any necessary options, and then press the Enter key. The shell will interpret the command, first handling any special shell syntax, and will then start the command as a new process.
Most commands operate silently unless they are specifically asked to say what they are doing. If there is no error message, the command should have worked.
When you type in a command name, Linux has to find the file which contains the program you want to run. This is how it does it:
The first word of what you type in is the command[3] itself. If this contains a slash character (/) the whole command is taken to be a path, either absolute (if it starts with /) or relative to the current directory. The file indicated by that path is used, provided that it exists, that it is executable and (in the case of a script) that it is readable.
If the command does not contain a slash, the shell searches for it in your current search path. This is a list of directories, separated one from another by colons. The command search path is held in the environment variable PATH: type echo $PATH to see what it is. For example,
$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/local/bin:/usr/games:/home/olly/bin
Each directory is searched in turn, starting at the beginning of the list. If
a match for the name is found, the shell also considers whether the file found
is executable (and readable, if it is a script). As soon as such a match is
found, the search stops[4]. This is
why new programmers often have trouble getting their first program to run.
They frequently call it test and run it without a path; the shell
finds the system program test first and runs that instead.
If you need to change your path, you should add the new directories to the end of the list; the current directory (.), if it is included at all, should go last of all[5]. The command to use is export PATH=$PATH:new_directory[6] .
The operation of most commands can be changed by putting command options immediately after the command name. There are several styles of options used, and you have to check the documentation for each command to know what options it can take, and what they do.
The most common form of option is a letter preceded by a hyphen, thus:
ls -l
With this option style, several single-character options can be combined into one, thus:
ls -ali
which is equivalent to
ls -a -l -i
Sometimes, single-letter options like this need an extra argument:
awk -F: -f /tmp/bar /tmp/foo
Here : and /tmp/bar are arguments to the options -F and -f respectively.
A few commands have options which need not be preceded by a hyphen. The one
you are most likely to use is tar.
tar cvmf /dev/st0 /usr
is the same as
tar -cvmf /dev/st0 /usr
A third option style, commonly used by GNU programs, is whole words or phrases introduced by --. Many commands can use both the single-letter and whole-word options:
tar --create --verbose --modification-time --file /dev/st0 /usr
Finally, commands may define completely different option patterns for themselves, such as options preceded by + as the opposite to -.
These commands are the ones you really need to know to get anything done.
We give only a brief description of the command, describing its basic use. For full details, you should always refer to the detailed documentation of the manual pages and the info files.
The brief examples given here are not by any means the only way of doing things; the key to using Unix is to learn the building blocks and their capabilities and become able to use them in your own way. Whatever the task, there is almost always more than one way to carry it out. Sometimes there will be five or six different ways!
In this chapter, things which are optional are shown like this. Words looking like this are to be replaced by whatever is appropriate to what you are trying to do.
To avoid annoying other users by questions on elementary matters, do, please, read the manuals!
These are the commands to let you do that:
man [section-number] subjectman shows the manual page on the command (use q or ctrl-C to get
out of it if it doesn't terminate at the end of the text). More details are
given in Documentation, Chapter 3.
This command is crucial for helping you learn how to use it and other Linux commands.
info [subject]
See Documentation, Chapter 3 for a full
description of how to use info.
help [subject]help for on-line help about bash's built-in commands.
help by itself prints a list of subjects for which you can ask for
help.
A fuller description of file-systems and file-handling is given in Files and File Systems, Chapter 4.
These are the commands that you really have to know:
pwdcd [directory]mkdir new_directorymkdir is used to create a new directory. new_directory
can be specified as a path, or as a simple name (in which case it is created in
the current directory).
mv source targetmv moves source file to target and deletes
source; source can be a list of files, but in that case
target must be a directory.
This is also the way to rename a file or directory.
cp source targetcp copies source to target. Again,
target can be a directory and source a list of files.
ln source targetln links source to target with hard or
symbolic links according to the options.
rm filelistrm deletes files. With the -r option it can delete directories
and their contents.
Be very careful with rm; once a file is deleted, you cannot get it
back. There is no undelete command.
rmdir directorylistrm deletes empty directories.
chmod mode filelistchmod changes the permissions of files and directories. The
mode is either an octal number, such as 644, or a
symbolic representation of it, such as u=rw,go=r.
chown owner[.group] filelistchown changes the ownership of files. Use the -R
option to do this for an entire directory tree.
If .group is specified as well as owner, the group ownership of the files is changed as well.
chgrp group filelistchgrp changes the group ownership of files. Use the
-R option to do this for an entire directory tree.
ls directoryls lists the contents of directory; by default, the
output is sorted.
There are more options to ls than to any other command. Those
most commonly used are -l, to show the file permissions and the
latest change date and -a, to show hidden dot-files.
Files are organised into file-systems (see Files and File Systems, Chapter 4).
Every Debian Linux system (and every Unix system) has a root file-system, called, simply, /. All files and devices in the system, and possibly files on other systems as well, are accessible under /. Files are placed under directories, which may themselves be placed in directories, and so on. Segments of this universal tree will be on different physical devices, or different sections (`partitions') of a single physical device. New file-systems, each with its own directory tree, may be grafted into the universal directory tree at arbitrary `mount-points'. (These are simply directories which are nominated to be the head of the new tree.)
The process of grafting a segment into the main tree is called `mounting'; the file system is mounted on a mount-point, which is a directory.
dfdf lists mounted partitions and shows the amount of space present,
used and available. (The partitions will probably include /proc, which is a
special `non-existent' partition, that contains information about the current
state of the Linux kernel.)
mount [partition directory]mount by itself lists mounted partitions.
It is also the command to use to add a partition's file-system into the universal directory tree. For example:
mount /dev/hda2 /usr
You have to be superuser (log in as root or run su)
in order to mount or unmount file-systems.
umount directoryumount removes a partition's file-system from the universal
directory tree. For example:
umount /usr
You have to be superuser (log in as root or run su)
in order to mount or unmount file-systems.
Files include physical devices, executable programs and directories, as well as text files. It is as well not to look at compiled executables on the screen however. At best they will be garbage; at worst they will make everything on the screen unreadable (see Managing your screen, Section 6.2.4.5 for a way to recover from this.)
cat textfile[s]cat dumps textfile[s] to screen without paging (like
DOS's type). If you name more than one file, each will be sent in order, with
no break or heading.
more textfile[s]more lists the textfile[s] to the screen in pages so
that you can read it. Press Space-bar to move on one page,
Enter to move on one line, and b to move back one
page. Use q or ctrl-c to quit.
more will quit automatically when it gets to the end of the last
file.
less textfile[s]less is like more but has more features and somewhat
different behaviour. You have to type Q to terminate it.
head textfile[s]head is used to see the first few lines of a file (by default, it
shows 10 lines).
tail textfile[s]tail is used to see the last few lines of a file (by default, it
shows 10 lines).
od -cx file[s]od is used to look at the contents of binary files. With no
options, it displays the file contents as a series of octal numbers. Since few
people are fluent with this form, the -c and the -x
options together are probably more useful. They display the file contents as
real characters where possible and as octal numbers if the characters are not
displayable, with, underneath, the hexadecimal representation. For example:
$ od -cx /bin/ls | more
0000000 177 E L F 001 001 001 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
457f 464c 0101 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000020 002 \0 003 \0 001 \0 \0 \0 240 217 004 \b 4 \0 \0 \0
0002 0003 0001 0000 8fa0 0804 0034 0000
0000040 204 o \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 4 \0 \0 005 \0 ( \0
6f84 0000 0000 0000 0034 0020 0005 0028
0000060 026 \0 025 \0 006 \0 \0 \0 4 \0 \0 \0 4 200 004 \b
0016 0015 0006 0000 0034 0000 8034 0804
0000100 4 200 004 \b 240 \0 \0 \0 240 \0 \0 \0 005 \0 \0 \0
8034 0804 00a0 0000 00a0 0000 0005 0000
[7]
The numbers in the left hand column are always octal; they indicate the byte offset of the first character on the line from the beginning of the file.
dd if=input_file of=output_filedd is used for arbitrary copying between files and devices (either
file1 or file2 or both could be devices instead of
files.) You can use dd to copy a file while dropping its first few
bytes, to break a file into chunks, to copy a disk image onto a floppy (for
instance to get a Debian boot floppy), to inspect the contents of a tape, or
anything else that your ingenuity can suggest.
find directory -name filenamefind tells you where filename is in the tree starting
at directory. This command has many other useful options.
xargs commandxargs is commonly used with find. It breaks long
lists of files given to a command into chunks that are short enough for the
shell to handle. In this way, you can run through the entire file system and
execute some command on all the selected files. For example, this command
looks for all files in your home directory that have been changed within the
last two days, and sets group write access on them all:
find $HOME -mtime -2 | xargs chmod g+w
grep pattern filelistgrep scans each file in filelist for lines which match
pattern (see Regular expressions, Section
6.3).
file filefile reports what kind of thing file is.
type filetype says where to find file in your search path.
whereis filewhereis is like type, but gives more information.
Managing your screen can be a very frustrating experience.
When you have sat helpless for a while trying to work out why your entire display contains total garbage, or why pressing an arrow key puts irrelevant characters up, you may well feel that it's time to tip the whole computer system into the dustbin and go back to the abacus. This section offers you a lifeline.
First of all, here are some commands to handle what you can see on your screen. The screen can be either the whole text display or a single text window in X.
tput clear
tput is a command that reads the terminfo database for the
sequence named, translates that sequence to screen control characters and sends
those characters to the screen. The clear sequence blanks the
screen and puts the cursor in the top left hand corner.
tput rmacssttystty controls communication between a VDU and the computer. It
controls characteristics such as the baud-rate, parity, number of stop-bits and
handshaking, all of which should be set up for you by your system administrator
(if that is you, read the System Administration manual). In the case of your
console, or of an xterm window, which are mapped directly from memory, the line
characteristics are irrelevant, but there are certain characteristics set by
stty which are relevant to every kind of display.
These are some characteristics could be used by you if it seemed necessary. (If it is necessary, you may find that nothing at all seems to work; this may be because the return key no longer works and Linux has reverted to using the basic default, which is new line (Ctrl-J). If nothing at all seems to work, press Ctrl-J before entering any command and finish your commands with Ctrl-J instead of return.)
stty
settings are.
In order to save space on your disks, many files are compressed. They are
scanned by a program such as gzip or compress and
reduced in size, often to about one third of their original size.
Compressed files cannot be read unless they are uncompressed again.
gunzip file.suffixgunzip uncompresses file.suffix (where
suffixis .gz or perhaps .Z), deletes it
and writes an uncompressed file called file.
In spite of its name, gunzip cannot handle zip format files
created by PKZIP. There is a pkunzip program that
can handle such files.
zcat compressed_filezcat does the same job as cat, but uncompresses
compressed_file first, without changing it on the disk.
zmore compressed_filezmore does the same job as more, but uncompresses
compressed_file first, without changing it on the disk.
zless compressed_filezless does the same job as less, but uncompresses
compressed_file first, without changing it on the disk.
zgrep compressed_filezgrep does the same job as grep, but uncompresses
compressed_file first, without changing it on the disk.
You need to do regular backups, in order to be able to recover your system and data in case of disaster. In order to get full access to all the files that need to be backed up, system backups must be done by the superuser. This section refers only to backups of your own home directory and of other files to which you have access.
These programs are used for backups of various kinds:
tartar is designed to archive directories with all their contents.
It has many options, but here is a simple example of using it to create a
backup of your home directory to a SCSI tape:
tar cvf /dev/st0 $HOME
Here is how to read the contents of a tape that has been written with
tar:
tar tf /dev/st0
and here is how to restore a particular directory (with its contents) from such a tape backup:
tar xvf /dev/st0 $HOME/private/letters
You can also restore a single file:
tar xvf /dev/st0 $HOME/private/letters/bank.21Aug
cpiocpio is used to write individual files to a backup. A list of
files is prepared in some way and then piped into the standard input of
cpio. This is how to use it to archive your home directory to
SCSI tape:
find $HOME -print | cpio -ovBH newc >/dev/st0
Here is how to read the contents of a tape that has been written with
cpio:
cpio -itBH newc </dev/st0
and here is how to restore a set of files in one directory whose names all start with `bank' from such a tape backup:
cpio -itBH newc "$HOME/private/letters/bank*" </dev/st0
afioafio is used like cpio to write individual files to a backup. It
has the additional capability of compressing files before it writes them on the
backup. This is useful if you have a lot of information to store on media of
limited capacity. This is how to use it to archive your home directory to SCSI
tape, using compression:
find $HOME -print | afio -ovZ >/dev/st0
There is one basic command for printing (though there are many for specialised uses):
lpr filelpr prints file to the default printer.
lpr is the user command for adding jobs to the spooler queue. The
jobs will continue to print, even if you log out.
If you have more than one printer, you can use the option -Pprinter to direct a job to one particular printer.
lpqlpq shows the current list of jobs on the printer spool queue.
lprm jobIdlprm removes the job identified by jobId from the
spooler queue. If a job is already printing, this may not stop it; the job may
already be stored in the printer's memory
See Text Editing, Chapter 8 for information on editing files.
A session is the series of events between logging in and logging out of the computer.
When you first log in, you will see a prompt, which may contain your current machine's hostname, and perhaps the current directory. The prompt ends with a dollar sign: $, which indicates that you are an ordinary user. If you become superuser, the dollar sign should change to a hash (or sharp) sign: #. You need to know that you are superuser, because you can then do a great deal of damage to your system by mistyping ordinary commands.
These commands relate to handling your session:
exit or logoutexit or logout to terminate your session and log
out. All jobs you have started are terminated, unless they were started with
nohup, and your screen should return you to the log-in prompt.
You can often use Ctrl-D to do the same, but that capability can be disabled.
susu to become superuser. You will be asked to enter a
password; this is the password for the root login.
Becoming superuser is almost the same as logging in as root. You get the same power to do damage. Be very careful!
Use exit, logout or ctrl-D to stop being superuser.
bg and fgbg. It will continue to
run in the background until it wants to send anything to the screen; then it
will stop and wait. You can bring it forward again and let it continue by
using the command fg.
script filescript to record everything that appears on the screen (until
the next exit) in file. This is useful if you need to record what's
going on in order to include it in your message when you ask for help. Use
exit, logout or ctrl-D to stop the recording session.
psps to list your processes.
$ ps
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
6122 p1 S 0:00 bash
6123 p2 S 0:00 bash
6408 p1 S 0:00 ftp
6916 p4 R 0:00 ps
13115 p7 SW 0:00 bash
19102 p3 SW 0:00 bash
19497 p4 S 0:00 -bash
19554 p3 S 11:25 uvsh
19623 p4 S 5:37 xemacs
21272 p6 SW 0:00 bash
You can also use ps to see all processes on the system:
$ ps -ax
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ? SW 0:18 init
2 ? SW 0:04 kflushd
3 ? SW< 0:00 kswapd
10 ? S 0:18 update
31 ? SW 0:00 nfsiod
32 ? SW 0:00 nfsiod
33 ? SW 0:00 nfsiod
34 ? SW 0:00 nfsiod
143 ? S 0:08 /sbin/syslogd
145 ? S 0:00 klogd
154 ? S 0:00 /sbin/kerneld
164 ? S 0:00 inetd
167 ? S 0:05 named
179 ? SW 0:00 run_job
183 ? SW 0:00 bootpd
205 ? SW 0:00 gpm
209 ? S 0:52 /usr/sbin/tcplogd
212 ? SW 0:00 icmplogd
... and so on ...
The number in the column headed PID is the identifying number of the process. Under column TT is the tty (screen or window identifier) where it is running. A question mark here means that it is not attached to any screen or window, but is running in the background.
ttytty shows you which terminal (screen or window) you are in.
$ tty
/dev/ttyp4
These commands relate to your identity as a user and the machine's own identity.
passwdpasswd to change the password that you use when you log in.
Follow the instructions on screen about what kind of password to choose. When
you type the password in, it doesn't show on the screen, so you have to enter
it twice, to ensure that you make no typing errors.
idid tells you what user you are and what group you are in.
$ id
uid=1000(olly) gid=1000(olly) groups=1000(olly),6(disk),20(dialout),25(floppy),26(tape),29(audio),34(backup),37(operator),101(priory)
uid indicates your user number, gid your group number (which will be assigned to files that you create) and groups lists the other groups that you are a member of.
who -uwho -u reports everyone who is logged on.
uname -auname -a reports the name, type and operating system
of your machine.
datedate reports the current time and date.
The superuser can use this command to set the date and time.
Turning the computer on and off is really a system administration subject, but I include it here because it is something that every user who is his own administrator needs to know. If someone else is responsible for administering the machine, you should neither need nor be able to shut it down.
shutdown -t 0 -h nowWhen you type a command, certain characters have a special meaning to the shell and are interpreted before the command starts to run. Full details are given in the chapter on shells, but you need to understand what is happening, or you will get results that you did not expect.
Shell special characters are interpreted by the shell as soon as it is given
the command. For example, if you type ls *.bak, the shell
translates *.bak to the list of all files in the current directory
whose names end in .bak. The ls command never
sees the asterisk. So if you want to search for files which actually have
an asterisk in their names, you have to escape the asterisk to stop the shell
from interpreting it.
linda:/tmp/junk$ ls **
fred george* joe mary peter*
linda:/tmp/junk$ ls *\*
george* peter*
linda:/tmp/junk$
In the example, the first command matched all files; the second matched only those with a literal asterisk at the end of their names.
The same goes for other special characters. here is the full list:
This is the same as typing Ctrl-Z and then bg to an already
running program.
For example, ls -d /[uv]* will list the names of all entries in the root directory that start with u or v. Unlike DOS, you can use patterns like g*.gz (with the wildcard bit in the middle).
These characters have a special meaning only if they are the first non-space character in the command:
$ ls *.cc
SQLBuilder.cc dbwindow.cc listitem.cc
$ ^cc^h^
ls *.h
SQLBuilder.h dbwindow.h listitem.h
Don't confuse shell special characters with special characters in regular expressions (see Regular expressions, Section 6.3). Regular expressions must be protected from the shell by enclosing them in single quotes.
Many commands are filters, so you can pass the output of one command to the input of another:
awk -F: '{print $1 " " $6}' /etc/passwd | sort
This is a fundamental concept of all Unix and Unix-like systems. Many commands are designed to be filters. They can therefore be used as building blocks to make more complex commands, in whatever way is needed at the time.
When the shell starts a command for you, it opens files for standard input, standard output and standard error. By default, standard input is your keyboard, standard output is your screen, and standard error is also your screen.
Although the defaults are keyboard and screen, this can easily be changed. In fact, the shell copies its own standard input, output and error when it starts a command, so the command inherits whatever the shell has. A command can change its own settings, by opening a different file, and you can tell the shell to use a file instead of the default of keyboard or screen.
The file descriptor numbers for standard input, standard output and standard error are 0, 1 and 2 respectively.
You can redirect standard input, output and error by adding these sequences after a command:
You can use this feature to empty a file, by typing
>file_with_unwanted_contents
on a line by itself.
There are more complex aspects to redirection, which may be studied in the shell manual pages.
Here are some very common uses of redirection:
cat [filelist] >output_filecat can be used to look at files. In
conjunction with redirection of standard output, it can be used to write files
as well.
If you omit filelist, cat will take its input from the keyboard, until you type ctrl-D.
echo textecho sends text to the standard output. It is commonly
used in script programs to put text on the screen.
It can also be used with redirection of output to write to a file. For example,
echo "An example file containing
two lines of text" >/tmp/example
and
echo "A third line added to the first two" >>/tmp/example
Redirection is a simple part of shell programming, for which see the manual pages of bash, zsh, tcsh, or whatever shell you have chosen. A shell program is a set of commands in a file or typed in.
for f in `grep -l widgets`
do
sed -e 's/widgets/gadgets/g' <$f ${f}gadget
echo $f
done
Once you have stored a shell program in a program file, you have to make it executable by running chmod:
chmod a+x my_program_file
Unix commands normally execute silently unless asked to be verbose or unless there is an error. An error means something that does not make sense to Linux; it doesn't mean something you don't want to happen!
For example, I once had a client who had some unwanted files in his root directory which were named &TEMP& and so on. As superuser in the root directory he typed rm -rf /&* when he should have typed rm -rf \&* What he actually asked for was to delete his entire file system, as a background job. It did too.
Regular expressions are a way of specifying some text to match without having to spell it out exactly. Regular expressions are used inside editors and in the grep command. They are not the same as the limited file pattern matching that is done by the command line.
A regular expression can be very simple or very complicated. Complicated
expressions are built up by joining together simple ones. In this section we
are only dealing with simple uses of regular expressions in the
grep and zgrep commands. The simplest expressions
are called atoms, because they cannot be broken down any further.
Here are the regular expression atoms:
The effect of this atom can be reversed by making `^' the first character inside the brackets. This means that any character matches except those in the brackets.
Some letters have special meanings if they follow a backslash: \t matches a tab character, \f matches a form feed character, and so on.
The regular expression atoms can be affected by these modifiers (+ and ? have
to be preceded by a backslash when used with grep):
Here is an example of the use of a regular expression with grep:
grep '^[A-Z][a-z]\+' basic_cmds.sgml
This command would list all lines in basic_cmds.sgml that start with a capital letter immediately followed by one or more lower case letters. The plus sign is escaped with a backslash to make it have its special meaning. The whole regular expression is in single quotes to protect it from being evaluated by the shell.
Debian User Reference Manual
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