18 Commands That Will Change The Way You Use Linux Forever 

I am a 78 yr old retired field tech from a Mirosoft and Novell background. With Microsoft shenanigans, I decided to move to Linux, it's been a steep learning curve but I enjoy it. This is the first time I've seen one of your vids. I think its great that you are teaching these tricks! Thank you so much. I'll be subscribing.

25+ years of command line advanced usage but with your video I learned about column -t and the history time variable

summary of the commands: 1. `cd -` : back to the last directory we've been to. 2. `ctrl+l`: clear screen 3. `reset`: clear on steroids - resets terminal session 4. `pushd /var` + few other `cd` commands + `popd`: commands that allow you to work with directory stack and change the current working directory 5. `vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config` + ctrl+fz : isn't closing, but minimizing the window to the back ground `fg` : bring back the window to the front. 6. `apt update`: would fail - cuz we fogot sudo `sudo !!` : would run the last command as sudo 7. 8. run command that already been run - `history`, choose a number of command and run it `!102` -> the 102 command from the history would run again 9.HISTTIMEFORMAT="%Y-%m-%d %T" `history` would should the history commands by the format. another way to add the format, is add it to the `~/.bashrc` file with `vim` or `nano` commands. 10.cmatrix -> let you look cool + ctrl c to escape 11.adjust font `shift +` or `shift -`, `reset` command would reset the font size 12. `ctrl a` - start of the line `ctrl e` - end of the line 13.chainning commands -> `ls -l; echo "hello" ` or -> `ls -l && echo "hello" ` && - would stop when meets an error ; - would pop up an error and keep on running the second/next command 14. `tail` / `head` commands to see top or bottom of a file. 15. truncate (be cautious while using this one - its risky) it allows to change the size of a very large files (like log files) for example `truncate -s ` == truncate -s 0 hello.txt to empty the hello.txt file 16. `mount | column -t` : make sure all the output shows in columns any verbose and messy command output would look better using `| column -t`

I use the "watch" command a lot for ad hoc progress monitoring. Also, to get to the home directory you only need to type "cd" no need for "cd ~". Cheers!

Good stuff! I learned a couple things! Regarding history, one other trick I do all the time is to re-execute the last command starting with a certain string. For example, !sudo will execute the last command in the history that started with "sudo". If you're not sure what that command is and want to see it before you execute it, you can type : !sudo :p The :p means preview the command but don't actually execute it (but it will add it to the history as if you had executed that command). If it's what you wanted to do, you can then just type !! and it will execute that command. And another trick I do all the time because of my clumsy typing is to quickly fix a typo and execute the previous command in one step using the caret ^ symbol. For example, if I type : sudp some really long intricate command I will get the error that sudp does not exist - oops, I meant to type sudo. All I have to do is type : ^sudp^sudo and it will reissue my previous command, replacing the first instance of "sudp" with "sudo". If you wanted to be really lazy, you could also type : ^p^o and it just replaces the first occurrence of "p" with "o"

CTRL U does remove the text on the line, if you are at the end of the line. What it is actually doing is removing from your cursor to the BEGINNING of the line. If you are in the middle of the line, it will remove everything BEFORE the cursor. Also, if you are in the middle of the line and type CTRL K, it will remove everything from the cursor to the END of the line. If you do CTRL A CTRL K, it is the same as CTRL U as you are going to the beginning and removing text to the end of the line. truncate was a new command for me (I've used 'cat /dev/null > filetoempty') and I learned about column, too! Cool video!

I just appreciate you record and upload this in 4k so the text is so crisp, this makes me happy.

As usual, great video for beginners. 👍! Keep it up.

Awesome video the column command and history navigation was especially helpful thanks again.

7:50 after ctrl + Z, the process is frozen, but you can type “bg” to make it continue running in the background. I use this all the time when e.g. I start some NodeJS service interactively, to see the messages, and then ctrl + Z, bg, enter, to turn it into a background process (and you can even exit the shell and it’s fine, it will continue running).

One the subject of pushing things in the background with crtl+z, there is wonderful tool called "screen". It's a terminal session that always runs in the background once started, even when you logout of the system. You can simply detach and re-attach whenever you need. It's a relic of times when terminal connections were not super reliable, like over dial up. In case of a connection drop, one could just re-login, re-attach screen and continue as if nothing happened.

Thank you Jay (+ Linode for sponsoring things). Love these things.

Love your work Jay. You are an excellent presenter. Thank you.

Jay, many thanks for a wonderful set of tips. Like many I have a grab bag of commands that I have picked up the the years to make life easier. These 18 little gems are fantastic. Many thanks. My favourite is CTRL Z and then return with fg. The number of times I have been in vi and need to quickly jump out and in, sometimes I'm to lazy to start another terminal session, this little trick solves that problem.

Thanks for doing this! I've been using Linux off and on for over 20 years and thought I knew my way around pretty well, and I learned a ton!

Thanks 🙏 for the video. I learned 3 Linux commands from it. pushd / popd / truncate Ctrl + w delete word by word.

Awesome content, like always. Thank you for not forgetting the beginners like me.

Exrtremely useful! Thanks so much. Always learn a lot from your videos!

This just might be the single greatest video I've ever watched in RU-vid.

1) the " truncate" command to clean the content of a file is pointless. If you want to delete the content of a file you " could" do with echo "" > /file_path/filename, but you can even skip the echo command. Just issue "> /file_path/filename" without the echo works and its much faster. 2) Ok mentioning ctrl +a and ctrl +e , but actually the keys "home" and "end" on your keyboard actually do the same. ( i use those) 3) A command i really like but is quite unkonwn is "tac" ( is like cat in reverse), and it's a "cat" command that reads a file bottom-up. Its quite usefull then you want to read a log file without knowwing how many lines to include. as example: tac /var/log/messages | more you read the logs starting with the most recent line and you can keep going backwards until you find what you are looking for.

along with 'ctrl a' and 'ctrl e', I use 'alt b' and 'alt f' for jumping backward and forward by word. This always helps if I need to jump to the middle of a very long command. 'alt leftarrow' and 'alt rightarrow' works similarly tooo. Also by the way all the linux short cuts also works with youtube video as well. Try it :) j - takes you 10 seconds backwards k - pause l - takes you 10 seconds forwards uparrow and downarrow increases volume f - fullscreen c - captions on (if available) m - for mute there are many shortcuts for youtube as well.

Thanks for another great video. One small side note, the "ctrl+u" will ((at least on my "Pop-OS 21-04")) indeed work as You demonstrated. How ever what it "really does" is "deletes" all the entered text to the left of the cursor. So if the cursor is "at the end" of the line it will indeed "delete the full line", but if the cursor instead is at the start it will do nothing. And of course if You have the cursor "somewhere in the middle" it will just "delete" the text to the left of the cursor Just thought I'd mention that (possibly petty) detail :) Best regards.

I love this channel im so grateful for it. Thanks for making me better.

Very useful tips! Thanks, Jay!

you simply have one of the most concise, eloquent and knowledge impacting channel. thank you, sir!

Great video! I have been using Linux for 3 years and come from a Windows admin background but this old dog still managed to learn some new tricks.

Really great video. I knew a lot of the stuff from years ago, but you also still showed a few more things that I didn't even know was possible.

Superb! Very informative and crystal clear 👍

Thanks, many good tips! I agree that You can go long way doing things inefficiently by routine. It is well worth taking time to learn an adequate set of tools for the job. Problem is that the possibilities available are sort of overwhelming, so tutorials like this are really valuable. 👍

cd - and column are game changers thanks for sharing Another one I like which isn't mentioned here is the alias command (written into the .rc file for persistence is a huge time saver for example alias dist-update="sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade-distro" Will run those commands every time you type dist-update into the terminal

I like to use ESC followed by . (period) This key combination will insert the last argument of the previous command at the cursor position. This is very useful when you've entered a long filename at the end of a command (which is common) and now you want to apply another command to that same file. You can keep pressing ESC, period to access the last argument of previous commands.

One of the most illuminating vids I've seen for ages!

Just made my beginner life lot easier in linux!❤️‍🔥

I didn't knew most of this tricks, some of them are super useful. Many thanks

Nice video! There's some good stuff in here I've not seen, like logging timestamps for commands in the history. 6:14 "^Z doesn't work with nano, I don't know why" Yeah, this one hit me a few times on some systems. Turns out, nano actually intercepts it depending on the configuration. If you want it to work, you can run nano with the -z option, or you can add 'set suspend' to your ~/.nanorc file.

Good video, lots of useful things here, only a few things I feel need pointing out/including along with similar topics. Not sure if this will have been said but where Ctrl+Z is being mentioned using the word "background" would be confusing terminology (this point will become clear very soon), Ctrl+Z as the terminal returns is stopping the process, `fg` will foreground it but typing `bg` will actually then allow it to remain running without its output being displayed, similar to running with `&` when initially running the command, thereby actually running in the background, background jobs will still be killed when the terminal is closed and can be viewed using the command `jobs -l` and resumed by running `fg %X` where X is the number listed in square brackets by `jobs -l`. I personally use this for copy operations I don't need to monitor but will take a couple of hours, whilst working on other things. Where && is used to mean run command only if success || can be used to run only if failure. `tail -f | grep ` also works on all systems I've used which can be very useful if you have busy log files and only certain things you want to see (or not see if you include the -v flag of grep).

Very good video on the command line. I'm 75 and grew up with UNIX while working with Bell Labs and developing software using C. I've been to a number of Unix Administration schools while working at Western Electric including Unix Internals. Back then there was no GUI and it was all command line interface on the terminal. I still have vi highly ingrained in me and today only use Ubuntu Linux. I really enjoyed your video and picked up a lot of new tips and some that shucked the old cobwebs into remembering. Thanks for the very well done video.

Some I knew, some more I didn't. Thanks for adding to my toolbox.

column is a great tip. ive been using linux for years and i didnt known it. thanks. btw i really like you clean and clear style. its very easy to watch

Awesome video, always looking for more stuff to learn to use the terminal. One day I might actually be able to call myself a "power user". Thanks heaps, extremely helpful.

use tail -F instead of -f (same as --follow plus nice --retry) It makes tail reading consistent the file even though the file rotates and a new file (with the same name of course) has been created

wow thank you so much!! Im still a novice in linux and only need to use it to rsync/wget stuff on webservers. i am half way through your video and i absolutly love what you are teaching here.. this is so much fun!!

I have two that I have found to be very useful. - If you have a large amount of work, and you just need it to go away you can type: exit - If you need to create a large amount of work for somebody else to get them off your back on why you are not doing anything you can SSH into a server and type: shutdown -h now

Great video. I learned a bunch. new subscriber. video length and content was perfect.

Gosh, a couple reminders here. Things I've learned but never used enough to remember. One thing I think you could have included in the last section (column) was holding ALT while click+dragging can allow you to highlight (and copy) just the contents of a single column or multiple columns (without highlighting the entire line). This trick has been a life saver for me when I have a bunch of columns and I don't want to spend 15 seconds writing out a command to extract just the one column.

Great demo. Just started using the OS. Very helpful.

Running a previous command is much easier when you can type the start of the command then press up/down arrow to find all matching commands. So just like MATLAB or other languages. This can be done by creating the file ".inputrc" in your home directory. Populate the file with the lines: " "\e[A":history-search-backward " and: " "\e[B":history-search-forward " - do ignore the outside quotes. Now after you restart the shell you will get up/down arrows that search your command history.

Good nerdin' on ya! I got learnt about Ctrl-L

My best youtube recommended video so far

Finally some really helpful shell video! Great channel, great content! Very useful practical tips/tricks

Ok, one minute in, and already the first tip blew my mind and made the video worth a like

Thanks for the great video. That cmatrix command and F11 is really cool! And of course all your other tips.

Excellent collection and many thanks for showing us!

Actually a bit surprised at how much useful new stuff I got out of this, I've been a linux user for 10-11 years.Thanks.

I hate to say this but many of the tutorials out there, the folks talking are hard to understand. I know that sounds bad, but it's a real issue either way. I greatly appreciate that you are in depth and easy to listen/hear. Thank you very much.

It's very clear, even to a person who is learning english. Very thanks, new subscriptor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Cheers!

I use curly brackets a lot, they allow for neat rename and other things. mv my_{first,second} And it will rename my_first to my_second. To understand a command expansion better, prepend the line with echo, and add more to the brackets, to see what happened before the line was executed.

"History | less" and the "!#" are a timesaver!!!! Can't forget "ctrl+c" or "ctrl+z" when stuck,.. lol Thank you for all the work and time you put into these videos!

Awesome! Can't believe I didn't know even a half of this tricks.

This is a very good video, it's a great time saving refresher with simple explanations

Very useful. Thanks for your time creating this video.

Thanks for your shortcuts, it's really really Helpful for 🙋.

Great job! Thanks for sharing! Almost everything was mew for me.

Thank you and appreciate your input to this world!

Thank you for these valuable, time-tested tips and tricks!

another useful shortcut is ctrl +right/left arrow . this will (mostly) tab back through the command by the word. EX: you typed a command like "while read file;do a=$(tr [A-Z] [a-z]) ;ehco "$a" >> newfile.txt < file.txt;done" note echo is misspelled, so you hit up arrow to bring the command back up, and hit ctrl+left arrow to go back and correct the spelling. ctrl+right moves one word to the right and ctrl+left goes left by one word. also the end key goes to the end of the line and the home key takes you to the beginning.

Thanks for those tips. I've actually learnt some new tricks.

I haven't seen much on this channel so maybe you already covered this but mastering the 'screen' command is a must have skill if you are doing any remote work on linux systems. It just takes one DC during a long task to make you appreciate the value of running long tasks in a dedicated screen so that you don't have to start over.

I learnt CTRL+u today. I used to do CTRL+a and then CTRL+k. Good tip. Thanks!

Looool I have literally the same background picture from a galaxy in my room ❤️❤️

Excellent! Works really well on my MAcBook and various Linux VM's

Love these tips! Adding to your Ctrl + shortcuts, I often use Ctrl + W to erase the whole "word" left of the cursor. (Delimiters for what counts as a "word" is set in a file, I forget where; also affects what gets selected when you double-click on text.) After many years fooling around / learning in bash, I only recently started putting those ".." to good use, to backup and reenter a path tree at a different point. e.g. I'm in /etc/ssl/certs and want to get to /etc/snmp I used to type 'cd ..' 'cd ..' 'cd snmp' But now just use 'cd ../../snmp'

good video mate and very fair to add the timestamps !

Thanks for these tips that seem so basic, yet I have been using Linux for years and had never heard of some of these. Again, thanks, and God bless.

I love all of you vids. Thanks for your work!

I haven't finished watching the video but I'm constantly exclaiming 'Ohh!' and 'Ahhh!'. Thank you.

Learned a few things today, thank you 😊

This cooler than I was expecting

One of my all time favorite Linux video.

Great tips. One of my favorites, not mentioned in the video is using Ctrl+x, Ctrl+e to edit complex commands and then execute them.

Again, some tips I din't know about after using Linux as my daily OS for 15 years! Thanks. :)

column -t is the new help for me. Thanks!

I love these shortcuts and history tips! When it comes to terminals (I work on Win and mac), every time I need to do something "non-standard" around cli, I am like a child lost in the woods, and always need help from google. I wish I had received a primer on terminals like all those bashrc, bash_profile stuff, how to deal with other terminal like ohmyzsh or fish, which configuration files they use, etc.

ctrl + l(clear screen shortcut), minimize/maximize, and history time are my favorite ones :)

In this last half hour I have learned more strait and to the point as well as very usefull stuff that was lacking in my scope of knowledge. Yet it did take me longer to get through it. I just had to try this stuff along the way. It really filled in some gaps as to dealing with the file system. I will find this information very usefull for my projects. My THANKS.

Great video thanks. What version of Linux was used in this video?

Hi, fortunate for me i found this video at the beginning of my journey with linux ... very nice video, thank you :D

The Ctrl-R is something I was thinking should exist... I am so glad that it does exist!

wow! Where have you been all my life! Thank you!

This is fantastic Jay, subscribed

Great, great, great content. Learned a lot in a little time. Thanks.

hi ! does popd and pushd handle multiple reference because i use a similar method that allow me to do that . Using the syntax =$(pwd) after that you can do cd $>var_name> or other stuff like copying ... thank you so much for that "cd -" thing

Very Helpful! Thank You! :-)

Great video! Lots of great tips and tricks! Thank you.

We can also use Ctrl+w to delete word by word in a long command where as Ctrl+u removes the whole command. Thank you for your video 🙂

Very good...Iknew most commands. but hats off to your efforts ..

very helpful! definitely increased my productivity! thank you very much

Nice. I never knew about the the Ctrl Z / fg functionality but I've needed it plenty of times.

instead of using "tail -f filename" I like using "less filename" and then shift+F, to force feed and update output as the file being updated. The advantage is that if I see something I need to troubleshoot or to go up and search for a keyword that draw my attention, I can do so right away while inside the "less" command. Even better I can do "less filename" search for the keyword, then do "shift+f" and if the keyword does show up while its feeding the content to the screen it will be immediately highlighted .

Not sure whether someone else mentioned that, but instead of tail -f I use less and press Shift-f to follow a file for some time. If something jumps to my attention, I can Ctrl-Z out of the follow mode, and go back to that line. You can also search with / for some particular errors, and they will be highlighted in follow mode, or use &search-string to just show the matching lines for your regex search in there.