this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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If you have any suggestions or criticisms, feel free to comment them.

Being plain text, it's much easier to read on a wide screen, or on something without line wrapping.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is really good. Clear and well laid out.

The only thing that might confuse some beginners is your specific choice of package manager.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I added more information to the installing software section, updated section title to specify Arch Linux, and added another section for Debian and Derivatives.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

You're awesome.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting compilation, there is cheat.sh, tldr and others though

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

I made this just as much for me as I did for others. Writing things down myself really helps me memorize them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nice work.

My tiny nitpick is that "touch" will create the file you specify if it doesn't exist. I've seen this usage a lot, so your example may benefit from mentioning it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

TIL „touch“ has other uses than creating a file

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Thanks for all the feedback! I'm much happier with it now, and I'll probably continue to make small changes over time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I find the references to file extension kinda confusing. Extensions mean a lot less in Linux cli, but I can tell youre just using them for examples. Maybe give more concrete examples instead.

ls *.sh to list all the files ending in .sh

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I updated various examples, and replaced with in most places and removed it from the legend.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know how this would be useful to someone reading the cheat sheet, but here's something interesting I just indirectly found out while skimming it through:

Ctrl+D does the same thing as ENTER, except the latter additionally sends the end-of-line character to the reader while the former sends nothing;
as is the case for shells or interactive programs like the Python REPL, Ctrl+D causes them to terminate only because it sends a string that is 0 characters long, and 0-size reads are universally interpreted as files reaching the end.

To test this: enter cat, type "hello" without pressing enter, then Ctrl+D: you should see "hellohello".
An extremely rare case of this being useful would be using netcat to send a string somewhere, without sending the end-of-line byte at the end.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I updated "Log out" to "Exit (sends a signal indicating the end of a text stream)". Which I think is a lot more accurate, and still easy to understand.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Oh. My. Gosh. I love this. Thank you. And thank you for being --verbose about the provenance and history of the document. And big big thank yous for the Internet Archive links. Bravo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Cool, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

would you upload this on github?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Done? I've never uploaded to GitHub before, and I was just doing what I thought I should do. I'll do my best to keep it updated with the version on my website.

https://github.com/ordinarybyte/linux_cheat_sheet

Is there a way to make GitHub automatically detect changes to the file at cerium.cc and update the repo? Or do they not allow that? I know a scheduled script would be able to work but I don't really want to have to run it myself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You can do some automation with GitHub Actions, but I have no idea if it can do specifically that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Usually you would go the other way around. Merge changes into git and then distribute from there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What do you mean about "/ root directory, eg /usr/bin/bash"? / is /, just the top-most directory

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yes, the top most directory, /, is the root directory.

Each directory is a branch in one giant tree structure. For example, if you have a directory containing two other directories, that is a branch that is splitting into two branches. All directories are descendants of the same root.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I added more detail to the description and made a more relevant example. (I think)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

You might consider putting a license on it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I've been using Linux for decades and I bet that'll still come in handy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

cd - changes to the previous directory

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does cd + work to go forward after using cd - ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

cd - negates cd -, so you're right back where you started! It's like multiplying 2 negatives.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

This is fantastic. Just at a glance I already learned something new! Definitely keeping this for reference.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Really cool!
Another good addition to this might be some script rudiments, like how to write and run simple .sh files

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

This is really nice!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Aren't Alt + Backspace, and Alt + Arrow Key Left/Right also terminal shortcuts?

I like your version, I am bookmarking it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You're a prince among men.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

And an Albert among princes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

This is really helpful, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

^S - stop terminal IO
^Q - resume terminal IO (if your terminal looks frozen, this is the one to try)
alt-b, alt-f - jump back/forward one word

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Awesome! Thank you kindly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Great idea. I'll keep this handy from now on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

At the end, in redirection, <<: that's not how here-documents work. The example gives the impression it will read the given file up until "STOP", but in reality the shell expects you to keep writing your here-doc until you write "STOP" and then feeds it to the program as if it were all on stdin. I don't think wc even does anything with the stdin if you give it a filename... Note that variable expansion will happen in here-docs, so it's a bit different than a simple cat. Also look into here-strings. And process substitution, I find that quite handy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

A little over a decade & a half and I find that very useful. Should have GPG in for reading signatures on software and such too. If you'd like I can contribute to GPG terminal as I've been using it for a good portion of that time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I've needed something like this for a while, thank you buddy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I owe you bigly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Alt + . inserts the last argument from the last command run into the current line. I find it helpful all the time.

less can be invoked directly, without having to be piped from cat: less <file> is mostly equivalent to cat <file> | less
I have considered making an alias/function that automatically determines if the file is longer than the terminal, using something like wc -l and stty -a | grep -oP "rows \d" and then either uses cat or less depending on that... but I already use sharkdp's bat, which has that baked in as well as many other conveniences

Don't forget tail -f <file> which is kind of like watch tail <file>

If you're going to have du, I would also have a section for df, I use the latter more often (but probably because I have like 5 mounts for my OS). Using them in combination is basically what all the gui disk usage analyzers do; something like df -h "oh, /var's almost full" (as previously mentioned, I have different folders on different partitions), then du -ah /var and so on to find problem areas

The "installing from source" section works maybe 50% of the time. It assumes a configure script, which isn't always the case. I've had a lot of source that comes bundled the way a .deb does: basically a compressed filesystem that assumes the $CWD is / (basically, if you uncompressed it in /, all the files would go where they needed to be). Sometimes they use language-specific build systems, so you might need go and rust and... Maybe it's best to just keep it your way and look up the rest, but do keep in mind the thing I said about compressed filesystems

find is great if you want to reindex everything from square 0; or if you only need to do small directory/tree. If you have the extra space to spare, install locate: it indexes the files beforehand (as a cron job) and yields results more quickly for searches that span entire filesystems; the only downside is that you have to manually reindex (sudo updatedb) to locate files installed the same day

In the Extracting, Sorting, and Filtering Data section, you might consider adding in sort -u and uniq which fill their own (overlapping) niches. sed and awk may be a bit more than beginner, but they are endlessly helpful. tr can be a useful shorthand for when cut and sed don't quite cut it, but you don't want to build a full in-line awk script.

Finally:

<command> 2>&1 <file> | Output and errors from <command> are redirected and appended to <file>

Should read "Output and errors from are redirected to " because the single > overwrites the existing file, as opposed to >> which, as you noted, appends to the end of the file