one year agoDinky pocketbooks: the command-line reference edition

I have fulfilled my intention from to create a dinky pocket book as a reference for useful terminal commands (see below). I'll be printing a set of these out for my colleagues to find on their desks next week.

The printable pdf can be found here, but if you are running safari — or a recent gecko build as now it also uses -moz-transform — you can print directly from the browser.

The HTML for the reference booklet together with some minor updates to the original booklet css can be found on github.

I rarely use the terminal so these are commands that I will find useful as a reference and some of these I always end up having to look up. It is not designed to be an exhaustive list but if you have any suggestions I would love to hear them!

screenshot of dinky pocket book for terminal commands reference

Navigate the file tree

changing directory to dirname

cd dirname

move up a directory in the tree—dont forget you can drag a folder in from the finder to get a path to that directory.

cd ..

go back to the last directory I was in

cd -

where am I? (present working directory)

pwd

list what's in this directory

ls

now give me more information in the listing

ls -lah

ssh to server

ssh user@domain.com

Find & open

list all files recursively in subdomains

find .

find all files with '.css' in the name

find . | grep .css

find the string 'prose' in the contents of all the files in this directory

grep -r "prose" .

open a file as if you had double clicked it in the finder (mac only)

open filename

open the current directory in the finder

open .

make a directory called dirname

mkdir dirname

create a file called filename if it doesnt exist or update last modified date if it does

touch filename

Move, remove & copy

move or rename a file or directory

mv oldname newname

remove a file

rm filename

remove a directory and all its contents. BE VERY CAREFUL! you could easily delete everything!

rm -rf dirname

copy a file

cp oldfilename newfilename

copy a directory and everything in it

cp -r olddirname newdirname

securely copy a file to / on a remote server — you can also copy a directory using scp -r

scp file user@domain.com:

Subversion

check out a repository to the current directory

svn co http://domain.com/svn/ .

update local directory from repository

svn up

are there new or modified files?

svn status

add new files to the repository

svn add filename

remove a file from subversion

svn remove filename

mark a previously conflicted file as resolved

svn resolved filename

who changed what line number of this file

svn blame filename

commit all changes in this directory

svn commit -m "commit msg"

Subversion & download

is this directory checked out from svn? and where?

svn info

show everything that has changed

svn diff

show what has changed in one file

svn diff filename

open text editor in order to specify which files to ignore from svn

svn propedit svn:ignore .

download a file to the current directory

wget URL

show the contents of a file in the terminal

curl URL

Help & information

run any command as root

sudo your-command-here

get help for any command, eg svn

svn --help

how long has this computer been on?

uptime

what is the size of the current directory and all the contents

du -h

cancel the command you were currently typing

ctrl + c

go to the beginning of the line in the terminal

ctrl + a

go to the end of the line in the terminal

ctrl + e

Posted at 5:01 pm on the 23rd of May 2009. 39 Comments

39 comments

  1. This is a good collection! I have an advice to look deeper in the arguments the commands take. For example, 
    find . | grep '.css'
    is not as idiomatic as 
    find . -name '*.css'
    And talking about ctrl+a, ctrl+e, you may want to take a look at my own cheat sheet that lists all the other shortcuts.

    Peteris Krumins 24th May 2009 08:35permalink.

  2. I'm also going to comment on your find command.
    find . -type f -exec grep -l ".css" {}\;
    This is an example of find giving you back a filename that has ".css" in it. It's also important to note that exec can execute pretty much any command.
    find . -type f -exec mycommand {}\;
    Note: {} is going to be the filename of the file it currently is on. Also the backslash is required.

    J 24th May 2009 14:38permalink.

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    find . -type f -exec mycommand {}\;
    Note: {} is going to be the filename of the file it currently is on. Also the backslash is required.
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23rd May 2009

You are reading "Dinky pocketbooks: the command-line reference edition" written by Natalie Downe on the 23rd of May 2009 at 5:01 pm.

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