The Art of Command Line

robi

Meta

Scope:

This guide is for both beginners and experienced users. The goals are breadth (everything important), specificity (give concrete examples of the most common case), and brevity (avoid things that aren't essential or digressions you can easily look up elsewhere). Every tip is essential in some situation or significantly saves time over alternatives.
This is written for Linux, with the exception of the "macOS only" and "Windows only" sections. Many of the other items apply or can be installed on other Unices or macOS (or even Cygwin).
The focus is on interactive Bash, though many tips apply to other shells and to general Bash scripting.
It includes both "standard" Unix commands as well as ones that require special package installs -- so long as they are important enough to merit inclusion.

Notes:

To keep this to one page, content is implicitly included by reference. You're smart enough to look up more detail elsewhere once you know the idea or command to Google. Use apt, yum, dnf, pacman, pip or brew (as appropriate) to install new programs.
Use Explainshell to get a helpful breakdown of what commands, options, pipes etc. do.

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