Useful toolsΒΆ

There are many, many programs installed by default on linux systems, but only a handful are needed in day-to-day usage.

These are some useful commands that you can explore for yourself:

  • file <path> - guess what type of file (i.e. gzipped file, PDF file, etc) is at the location <path>
  • du - show the disk usage (i.e. file size) of files in a directory, or summarized for all files beneath a directory
  • df - show the disk volumes mounted on the current filesystem and their capacity and usage
  • ln -s <src> [<dest>] - create a symbolic link, which is a file that points to file <src> and is named <dest> (same as <src> filename by default)

The following commands are very useful but warrant some explanation and so are described in a final video:

  • pushd and popd - modify your directory stack, so you can switch between different directories quickly
  • find - search for files with particular characteristics (e.g. filename pattern) recursively from a given directory
  • xargs / fim - execute the same command on a list of input