True, you don't NEED to know Linux shell commands these days; you can get along just fine with a GUI interface. But the command-line tools can still come in darned handy sometimes. Here’s the commands with which Linux desktop users should be most familiar, and guidelines about when to use them.

Perhaps your company is just switching to Linux, to save on costs. Or, maybe you’re starting University, and you have no idea how to get around the Linux Systems they’ve just installed. Or if you’re like me, you’re curious about how Linux works, and you have it installed at home.

It takes years maybe decades to master the commands available to you at the Linux shell prompt. Here are 10 that
you will have never heard of or used. They are in no particular order.

If you spend any length of time in the shell, chances are you've typed the same commands over and over. It's usually not anything you can necessarily script as the commands may vary slightly on each invocation, but there are certain commands that can be used often with a little variation on each call.

Sometimes, if you’re following a tutorial on doing something on your Linux box and you’re trying to fix something, you’ll be asked to go to a terminal and type in some commands. Often, these commands need to be run as root, the administrator.

Scripts are files that contain shell commands which may be short or can be very complex. Scripts just make it easier because you can invoke one command to run all of the commands in the script. Here instead of using 8 separate commands you can use one command to execute all of them.

As a Linux user you’ll come to learn and love certain commands. Remembering these commands is the toughest part. Some people use cheat-sheets some create scripts, and some just refer to website for their fix. Here I have posted the 25 top command line snippets.

The following are some of the most commonly used MS-DOS commands and its equivalent in Linux. This cheat sheet is for those of you who have just switched from Windows to Linux and are just getting acquainted with the terminal.

While a few commands, such as 'cd' are built directly into bash; many of the most important commands come from coreutils, a GNU package containing over a hundred commands.