The most referenced and most often used command on any Linux distribution is man, which lets users read the manual pages of other commands. Here are a couple of less well-known but useful commands that let you bookmark a position within a man page, and test a command you read from the man page without closing the page.

The output of most GNU command line tools is normally sent to the terminal (ie – standard output). There are times when you would like to have the output saved as a file. Now, you could copy the text from the terminal and paste it into a text editor and save it, but there’s a better way...

A shell is a command interpreter which allows the user to interact with the computer. The way things work is simple: the user types in commands, the shell interprets them and performs the tasks it was asked to do, and finally it sends the result to the standard output (which is usually the screen). For example, the output of the ls command can be something like:

In this context, a one-liner is a set of commands normally joined through a pipe (|). When joined by a pipe, the command on the left passes its output to the command on the right. Simple or complex, you can get useful results from a single line at the bash command prompt.

There are times when you will want to trim some information from the output of a command. This may be because you want to feed that output into another command. Whatever the reason for wanting to manipulate the output, awk is one of many tools available in GNU/Linux to perform this task.

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.

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.

I've shown previously how to use the more command to view text output. Today I'll show how to do the same thing with the less command. You can run the command simply by opening a terminal window and entering...

The Linux tee command is a way to write the standard output to a file. This is a little different from redirecting output to a file. In this case, the output is still send to standard out, but an additional copy is sent to create your text file.