by Wyatt Walter

Created on: June 05, 2009   Last Updated: June 09, 2009

Often new users to Linux eat up the standard ls, cd, rm, cp, mv, and other commands right away, but to really take off up the steep learning curve for Linux one needs to understand some very key troubleshooting utilities as well. My experience with new Linux users is on the server side of things, but knowledge of these utilities can also be helpful on the desktop as well. One does need to learn the basic shell navigation commands to get around, of course, but I've compiled a list of the commands that I've had to master to start down the road to become a "l33t h4x0r".

man

Everyone knows the saying about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish, but often new Linux users aren't taught to fish. Using man, one can find information on the usage of utilities or will find information about how certain configuration files are supposed to be setup. One can run 'man ls' to find out usage on ls, even if they don't know how the ls command works. In most cases you can run -help after the command to find brief information on how to use a command, but the man page will typically be much, much more extensive.

chmod / chown

Using proper permissions is absolutely critical to Linux systems for them to function properly. Unfortunately, learning about permissions and how to manipulate them is one of the most over-looked by those trying to teach new users. I know that when I first started out and something didn't work due to a permissions problem I'd just quick 'chmod 777' the file or directory to rule out the issue. When that worked, often I didn't go back. Learning how to properly use the chmod and chown commands is key as one starts out in the Linux world and it still can sometimes catch a veteran off guard.

tail

The one thing that I love about Linux (or any *NIX) is that the logging is much more verbose. Using cat can be cumbersome when looking through large log files as cat will dump the whole file out to the screen, often taking a long time if the log file is of any size. Using 'tail -f', one can watch a log (or any other file) for text being added to the end of it. I use this function every single day at work as it helps me to debug problems in real time.

ps

The ps command will show a list of running processes to the screen. It allows you to see what background processes may be running or check that certain processes are indeed running. Running 'ps aux' on a Linux system will show you all processes running on the machine. The output can be helpful

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