What are the most commonly used commands?
Here are some short notes on the most commonly used commands. (I explain the origin of the command name in those cases where it isn’t obvious.) Note that there are more details about several of these commands in some of the other sections of this FAQ. For full details about any of these commands, read the corresponding ‘man’ page – for example to find out more about the ‘ls’ command, read ‘man ls’. (By the way, the man pages are split up into sections. You will mostly be interested in section 1 since that describes the commands you can run from the shell. Sections 2 & 3 describe C-functions that are useful when you are writing a program.) And if you are looking for a command to do something that isn’t mentioned here, note that ‘man -k some_subject’ will show a list of man pages where “some_subject” is mentioned. That might help you find a command to do what you want. Another method of finding useful commands is to look at the “See also” section of related commands.
Here are some short notes on the most commonly used commands. (I explain the origin of the command name in those cases where it isn’t obvious.) Note that there are more details about several of these commands in some of the other sections of this FAQ. For full details about any of these commands, read the corresponding ‘man’ page – for example to find out more about the ‘ls’ command, read ‘man ls’. (By the way, the man pages are split up into sections. You will mostly be interested in section 1 since that describes the commands you can run from the shell. Sections 2 & 3 describe C-functions that are useful when you are writing a program.) And if you are looking for a command to do something that isn’t mentioned here, note that ‘man -k some_subject’ will show a list of man pages where “some_subject” is mentioned. That might help you find a command to do what you want. Another method of finding useful commands is to look at the “See also” section of related commands. The ‘whatis’ command
