Unix commands
Misc commands File management comparison and searching Text processing
Shell and other programming communications Storage commands System status

Misc commands

man,banner,cal, calendar,clear,nohup, tty .

Man ual command.
man man This is help command, and will explains you about online manual pages you can also use man in conjunction with any command to learn more about that command for example.


Banner command.
banner prints characters in a sort of ascii art poster, for example to print wait in big letters. I will type
banner wait at unix command line or in my script. This is how it will look.

  
 #    #    ##       #     #####
 #    #   #  #      #       #
 #    #  #    #     #       #
 # ## #  ######     #       #
 ##  ##  #    #     #       #
 #    #  #    #     #       #
 

Cal command
cal command will print the calander on current month by default. If you want to print calander of august of 1965. That's eightht month of 1965.
cal 8 1965 will print following results.

    August 1965
 S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
 

Clear command

clear command clears the screen and puts cursor at beginning of first line.


Calendar command
calendar command reads your calendar file and displays only lines with current day.
For example in your calendar file if you have this

12/20   Test new software.
1/15    Test newly developed 3270 product.
1/20    Install memory on HP 9000 machine.
On dec 20th the first line will be displayed. you can use this command with your crontab file or in your login files.

Nohup command.
nohup command if added in front of any command will continue running the command or process even if you shut down your terminal or close your session to machine. For exmaple, if I want to run a job that takes lot of time and must be run from terminal and is called update_entries_tonight .
nohup update_entries_tonight will run the job even if terminal is shut down in middle of this job.


Tty command
Tty command will display your terminal. Syntax is
tty options


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File Management commands.

cat,cd, cp, file,head,tail, ln,ls,mkdir ,more,mv, pwd, rcp,rm, rmdir, wc.


Pwd command.
pwd command will print your home directory on screen, pwd means print working directory.

 /u0/ssb/sandeep
is output for the command when I use pwd in /u0/ssb/sandeep directory.

Ls command
ls command is most widely used command and it displays the contents of directory.


Mkdir command.
mkdir sandeep will create new directory, i.e. here sandeep directory is created.


Cd command.
cd sandeep will change directory from current directory to sandeep directory.
Use pwd to check your current directory and ls to see if sandeep directory is there or not.
You can then use cd sandeep to change the directory to this new directory.


Cat command
cat cal.txt cat command displays the contents of a file here cal.txt on screen (or standard out).

Head command.
head filename by default will display the first 10 lines of a file.
If you want first 50 lines you can use head -50 filename or for 37 lines head -37 filename and so forth.


Tail command.
tail filename by default will display the last 10 lines of a file.
If you want last 50 lines then you can use tail -50 filename.


More command. more command will display a page at a time and then wait for input which is spacebar. For example if you have a file which is 500 lines and you want to read it all. So you can use

more filename


Wc command
wc command counts the characters, words or lines in a file depending upon the option.


File command.
File command displays about the contents of a given file, whether it is a text (Ascii) or binary file. To use it type
file filename. For example I have cal.txt which has ascii characters about calander of current month and I have resume1.doc file which is a binariy file in microsoft word. I will get
file resume.doc

resume1.doc:    data   
file cal.txt
cal.txt:        ascii text

Cp command.
cp command copies a file. If I want to copy a file named oldfile in a current directory to a file named newfile in a current directory.
cp oldfile newfile
If I want to copy oldfile to other directory for example /tmp then
cp oldfile /tmp/newfile. Useful options available with cp are -p and -r . -p options preserves the modification time and permissions, -r recursively copy a directory and its files, duplicating the tree structure.


Rcp command.
rcp command will copy files between two unix systems and works just like cp command (-p and -i options too).
For example you are on a unix system that is called Cheetah and want to copy a file which is in current directory to a system that is called lion in /usr/john/ directory then you can use rcp command
rcp filename lion:/usr/john
You will also need permissions between the two machines. For more infor type man rcp at command line.


Mv command.
mv command is used to move a file from one directory to another directory or to rename a file.


Ln command.
Instead of copying you can also make links to existing files using ln command.
If you want to create a link to a file called coolfile in /usr/local/bin directory then you can enter this command.
ln mycoolfile /usr/local/bin/coolfile


Rm command.
To delete files use rm command.


Rmdir command.
rmdir command will remove directory or directories if a directory is empty.



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Comparison and Searching

diff,dircmp, cmp, grep, find.


Diff command.
diff command will compare the two files and print out the differences between.
Here I have two ascii text files. fileone and file two.
Contents of fileone are

This is first file 
this is second line
this is third line
this is different    as;lkdjf 
this is not different

filetwo contains
This is first file
this is second line
this is third line
this is different    xxxxxxxas;lkdjf
this is not different

diff fileone filetwo will give following output
 4c4
< this is different    as;lkdjf
---
> this is different    xxxxxxxas;lkdjf

Cmp command.
cmp command compares the two files. For exmaple I have two different files fileone and filetwo.
cmp fileone filetwo will give me

fileone filetwo differ: char 80, line 4 

if I run cmp command on similar files nothing is returned.
-s command can be used to return exit codes. i.e. return 0 if files are identical, 1 if files are different, 2 if files are inaccessible.
This following command prints a message 'no changes' if files are same
cmp -s fileone file1 && echo 'no changes' .
no changes

Dircmp Command.
dircmp command compares two directories. If i have two directories in my home directory named
dirone and dirtwo and each has 5-10 files in it. Then
dircmp dirone dirtwo will return this

 Dec  9 16:06 1997  dirone only and dirtwo only Page 1
 
 
./cal.txt                                   ./fourth.txt
./dohazaar.txt                              ./rmt.txt
./four.txt                                  ./te.txt
./junk.txt                                  ./third.txt
./test.txt 

Grep Command
grep command is the most useful search command. You can use it to find processes running on system, to find a pattern in a file, etc. It can be used to search one or more files to match an expression.
It can also be used in conjunction with other commands as in this following example, output of ps command is passed to grep command, here it means search all processes in system and find the pattern sleep.
ps -ef | grep sleep will display all the sleep processes running in the system as follows.

 
     ops 12964 25853  0 16:12:24 ttyAE/AAES  0:00 sleep 60
     dxi 12974 15640  0 16:12:25 ttyAH/AAHP  0:00 sleep 60
     ops 12941 25688  0 16:12:21 ttyAE/AAEt  0:00 sleep 60
     ops 12847 25812  0 16:11:59 ttyAH/AAH6  0:00 sleep 60
     ops 12894 25834  0 16:12:12 ttyAE/AAEX  0:00 sleep 60
     dxi 13067 27253  2 16:12:48 ttyAE/ABEY  0:00 sleep 1
     ops 13046 25761  0 16:12:44 ttyAE/AAE0  0:00 sleep 60
     dxi 12956 13078  0 16:12:23 ttyAG/AAG+  0:00 sleep 60
     ops 12965 25737  0 16:12:24 ttyAE/AAEp  0:00 sleep 60
     ops 12989 25778  0 16:12:28 ttyAH/AAHv  0:00 sleep 60
     ssb 13069 26758  2 16:12:49 ttyAH/AAHs  0:00 grep sleep
     pjk 27049  3353  0 15:20:23 ?           0:00 sleep 3600

other associated commands with grep are egrep and fgrep. egrep typically runs faster. for more information type man egrep or man fgrep in your system.


Find command.
Find command is a extremely useful command. you can search for any file anywhere using this command provided that file and directory you are searching has read write attributes set to you ,your, group or all. Find descends directory tree beginning at each pathname and finds the files that meet the specified conditions. Here are some examples.

Some Examples:
find $HOME -print will lists all files in your home directory.
find /work -name chapter1 -print will list all files named chapter1 in /work directory.
find / -type d -name 'man*' -print will list all manpage directories.
find / -size 0 -ok rm {} \; will remove all empty files on system.

conditions of find


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Text processing

cut,paste, sort, uniq,awk,sed,vi.


Cut command.
cut command selects a list of columns or fields from one or more files.
Option -c is for columns and -f for fields. It is entered as
cut options [files]
for example if a file named testfile contains

 
this is firstline
this is secondline
this is thirdline
Examples:
cut -c1,4 testfile will print this to standard output (screen)
 
ts
ts
ts
It is printing columns 1 and 4 of this file which contains t and s (part of this).

Paste Command.
paste command merge the lines of one or more files into vertical columns separated by a tab.
for example if a file named testfile contains

 
this is firstline
and a file named testfile2 contains
this is testfile2
then running this command
paste testfile testfile2 > outputfile
will put this into outputfile
this is firstline       this is testfile2 
it contains contents of both files in columns.
who | paste - - will list users in two columns.

Sort command.
sort command sort the lines of a file or files, in alphabetical order. for example if you have a file named testfile with these contents

zzz
aaa
1234
yuer
wer
qww
wwe
Then running
sort testfile
will give us output of
1234
aaa
qww
wer
wwe
yuer
zzz

Uniq command.
uniq command removes duplicate adjacent lines from sorted file while sending one copy of each second file.
Examples

sort names | uniq -d will show which lines appear more than once in names file.


Awk and Nawk command.
awk is more like a scripting language builtin on all unix systems. Although mostly used for text processing, etc.
Here are some examples which are connected with other commands.
Examples:
df -t | awk 'BEGIN {tot=0} $2 == "total" {tot=tot+$1} END {print (tot*512)/1000000}' Will give total space in your system in megabytes.
Here the output of command df -t is being passed into awk which is counting the field 1 after pattern "total" appears. Same way if you change $1 to $4 it will accumulate and display the addition of field 4
which is used space.
for more information about awk and nawk command in your system enter man awk or man nawk.


Sed command.
sed command launches a stream line editor which you can use at command line.
you can enter your sed commands in a file and then using -f option edit your text file. It works as
sed [options] files


for more information about sed, enter man sed at command line in your system.

Vi editor.
vi command launches a vi sual editor. To edit a file type
vi filename
vi editor is a default editor of all Unix systems. It has several modes. In order to write characters you will need to hit i to be in insert mode and then start typing. Make sure that your terminal has correct settings, vt100 emulation works good if you are logged in using pc.
Once you are done typing then to be in command mode where you can write/search/ you need to hit :w filename to write
and in case you are done writing and want to exit
:w! will write and exit.



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Shell and programming

Shell programming,bourne shell, ksh, csh, echo,line,sleep, test,cc compiler.

Shell programming concepts and commands.
Shell programming is integral part of Unix operating systems. Shell is command line userinterface to Unix operating system, User have an option of picking an interface on Unix such as ksh, csh, or default sh., these are called shells(interface). Shell programming is used to automate many tasks. Shell programming is not a programming language in the truest sense of word since it is not compiled but rather an interpreted language. Unix was written in C language and thus c language is integral part of unix and available on all versions. Shells, like ksh and csh are popular shells on unix although there are 5 or 6 different shells available but I will only be discussing ksh and csh as well as sh. Common features among all shells are job control, for example if I am running a processes which is searching the whole system for .Z files and output is directed to a file named compressedfiles.


Bourne Shell (sh shell).
sh or Bourne shell is default shell of Unix operating systems and is the most simplest shell in Unix systems.


Ksh shell (Korn).
Ksh or Korn shell is widely used shell.


Csh or C shell
csh is second most used shell.


Echo command
echo command in shell programming.


Line command.
line command in shell programming.


Sleep command.
sleep command in shell programming.


Test Command.
test command in shell programming.


CC compiler (c programming language compiler).
Since Unix is itself written in C programming language, most Unix operating systems come with c compiler called cc.



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Communications

cu,ftp,login, rlogin,talk,telnet, vacation and write .

Cu command.
cu command is used for communications over a modem or direct line with another Unix system.
Syntax is
cu options destination


Ftp command (protocol).
ftp command is used to execute ftp protocol using which files are transferred over two systems.
Syntax is
ftp options hostname

ftp hostname by default will connect you to the system, you must have a login id to be able to transfer the files. Two types of files can be transferred, ASCII or Binary. bin at ftp> prompt will set the transfer to binary. Practice FTP by ftping to nic.funet.fi loggin in as anomymous with password being your e-mail address.

Login command.
login command invokes a login session to a Unix system, which then authenticates the login to a system. System prompts you to enter userid and password.


Rlogin command.
rlogin command is used to log on to remote Unix systems, user must have permissions on both systems as well as same userid, or an id defined in .rhosts file. Syntax is
rlogin options host


Talk command.
talk command is used to invoke talk program available on all unix system which lets two users exchange information back and forth in real time. Syntax is
talk userid@hostname


Telnet command.
Telnet command invokes a telnet protocol which lets you log on to different unix, vms or any machine connected over TCP/IP protocol, IPx protocol or otherwise. Syntax is
telnet hostname


Vacation command.
vacation command is used when you are out of office. It returns a mail message to sender announcing that you are on vacation. to disable this feature, type mail -F " " .
syntax is
vacation options


Write command will initiate an interactive conversation with user. Syntax is
write user tty



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Storage commands
compress uncompress, cpio,dump,pack, tar, mt.

Compress command.
Compress command compresses a file and returns the original file with .z extension, to uncompress this filename.Z file use uncompress filename command. syntax for compress command is
compress options files


Uncompress command.
Uncompress file uncompresses a file and return it to its original form.
syntax is
uncompress filename.Z this uncompresses the compressed file to its original name.


Cpio command.
cpio command is useful to backup the file systems. It copy file archives in from or out to tape or disk, or to another location on the local machine. Its syntax is
cpio flags [options]


Dump command is useful to backup the file systems.
dump command copies all the files in filesystem that have been changed after a certain date. It is good for incremental backups. This information about date is derived from /var/adm/dumpdates and /etc/fstab .
syntax for HP-UX dump is
/usr/sbin/dump [option [argument ...] filesystem]


Pack command.
pack command compacts each file and combine them together into a filename.z file. The original file is replaced. Pcat and unpack will restore packed files to their original form.
Syntax is
Pack options files


Tar command.
tar command creates an archive of files into a single file.
Tar copies and restore files to a tape or any storage media. Synopsis of tar is
tar [options] [file]

Examples:
tar cvf /dev/rmt/0 /bin /usr/bin creates an archive of /bin and /usr/bin, and store on the tape in /dev/rmt0.
tar tvf /dev/rmt0 will list the tape's content in a /dev/rmt0 drive.
tar cvf - 'find . -print' > backup.tar will creates an archive of current directory and store it in file backup.tar.



Mt command

Mt command is used for tape and other device functions like rewinding, ejecting, etc. It give commands to tape device rather than tape itself. Mt command is BSD command and is seldom found in system V unix versions.
syntax is
mt [-t tapename] command [count]


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System Status

at, chmod,chgrp, chown,crontab,date, df,du, env, finger, ps,ruptime, shutdwon,stty, who.


At command.
at command along with crontab command is used to schedule jobs.
at options time [ddate] [+increment] is syntax of at command.
for example if I have a script named usersloggedin which contains.

 #!/bin/ksh
who | wc -l
echo "are total number of people logged in at this time."
and I want to run this script at 8:00 AM. So I will first type at 8:00 %lt;enter>
usersloggedin %lt;enter>
I will get following output at 8:00 AM
      30
are total number of people logged in at this time.

Chmod command.
chmod command is used to change permissions on a file.
for example if I have a text file with calender in it called cal.txt.
initially when this file will be created the permissions for this file depends upon umask set in your profile files. As you can see this file has 666 or -rw-rw-rw attributes.

ls -la cal.txt

-rw-rw-rw- 1 ssb dxidev 135 Dec 3 16:14 cal.txt

In this line above I have -rw-rw-rw- meaning respectively that owner can read and write file, member of the owner's group can read and write this file and anyone else connected to this system can read and write this file., next ssb is owner of this file dxidev is the group of this file, there are 135 bytes in this file, this file was created on December 3 at time16:14 and at the end there is name of this file. Learn to read these permissions in binary, like this for example Decimal 644 which is 110 100 100 in binary meand rw-r--r-- or user can read,write this file, group can read only, everyone else can read only. Similarly, if permissions are 755 or 111 101 101 that means rwxr-xr-x or user can read, write and execute, group can read and execute, everyone else can read and execute. All directories have d in front of permissions. So if you don't want anyone to see your files or to do anything with it use chmod command and make permissions so that only you can read and write to that file, i.e.
chmod 600 filename.


Chgrp command.
chgrp command is used to change the group of a file or directory.
You must own the file or be a superuser.
chgrp [options] newgroup files is syntax of chgrp.
Newgroup is either a group Id or a group name located in /etc/group .


Chown command.
chown command to change ownership of a file or directory to one or more users.
Syntax is
chown options newowner files


Crontab command.
crontab command is used to schedule jobs. You must have permission to run this command by unix Administrator. Jobs are scheduled in five numbers, as follows.

 Minutes 		0-59
				Hour    		0-23
				Day of month	1-31
				month			1-12
				Day of week		0-6 (0 is sunday) 
so for example you want to schedule a job which runs from script named backup_jobs in /usr/local/bin directory on sunday (day 0) at 11.25 (22:25) on 15th of month. The entry in crontab file will be. * represents all values.
 25 22  15 * 0 /usr/local/bin/backup_jobs 
The * here tells system to run this each month.
Syntax is
crontab file So a create a file with the scheduled jobs as above and then type
crontab filename .This will scheduled the jobs.

Date command.
Date displays todays date, to use it type date at prompt.

Sun Dec  7 14:23:08 EST 1997 
is similar to what you should see on screen.

Df command.
df command displays information about mounted filesystems. It reports the number of free disk blocks. Typically a Disk block is 512 bytes (or 1/2 Kilobyte).
syntax is
df options name


Du command.
du command displays disk usage.


Env command.
env command displays all the variables.


Finger command.
finger command.


PS command
ps command is probably the most useful command for systems administrators. It reports information on active processes.
ps options


Ruptime command.
ruptime command tells the status of local networked machines.
ruptime options


Shutdown command.
Shutdown command can only be executed by root. To gracefully bring down a system, shutdown command is used.


Stty command
stty command sets terminal input output options for the current terminal. without options stty reports terminal settings.
stty options modes < device


Who command
who command displays information about the current status of system.
who options file
Who as default prints login names of users currently logged in.



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Advance unix command concepts

Put advance commands utilities, redirection, etc here.

cal > cal.txt To create a new file called cal.txt that has calendar for current month. > sign redirects output from stdout (screen) to a file.



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Fundamentals of Unix Unix commands User Accounts Shell Programming
File Systems Networking Backups Security
Installing software Installing Hardware Performance and Tuning Some Useful Scripts


Copyrighted by Sandeep singh Bajwa.