Starters for Linux - Part 2

Ahoy there friends, hope you enjoyed our previous article that briefed you about the Basic Command Line Interface tools available in Linux.

In the previous article of this series we introduced to you some of the essential commands that you should know in order to get started on your Linux box. So if by now you have mastered some of those commands you can go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back ;-).

Today we are going to deal with some of the common Linux commands regarding System Information, Basic System Administration, Process Control and network administration. The commands given here are just some of the several commands that you will have learnt about by the end of the article. The information that we have provided here is just the tip of the iceberg, so we urge you to keep reading various other documents and books to get yourself updated on the various other commands in Linux. As the saying goes, Self Help is the Best Help.

System Information

who

List the users logged in on the machine. --

rwho -a

List all users logged in on your network. The rwho service must be enabled for this command to work.

finger user_name

System info about a user. Try: finger root last. This lists the users last logged-in on your system.

history | more

Show the last (1000 or so) commands executed from the command line on the current account. The | more causes the display to stop after each screen fill.

pwd

Print working directory, i.e. display the name of your current directory on the screen.

hostname

Print the name of the local host (the machine on which you are working).

whoami

Print your login name.

id username

Print user id (uid) and his/her group id (gid), effective id (if different than the real id) and the supplementary groups.

date

Print or change the operating system date and time. E.g., change the date and time to 2000-12-31 23:57 using this command

date 123123572000

To set the hardware clock from the system clock, use the command (as root)

setclock

time

Determine the amount of time that it takes for a process to complete+ other info. Don’t confuse it with date command. For e.g. we can find out how long it takes to display a directory content using time ls

uptime

Amount of time since the last reboot

ps

List the processes that are have been run by the current user.

ps aux | more