Terminal commands worth remembering

A cheat sheet that will keep growing. Everything here works in Bash on most Linux distributions.

Files#

bash

# Biggest things in the current directory
du -sh * | sort -rh | head

# Files changed in the last day
find . -type f -mtime -1

# Copy a folder somewhere else, with a progress bar
rsync -ah --info=progress2 src/ dest/

Searching#

bash

# Search recursively, with line numbers
grep -rn "TODO" .

# The same, but much faster and it respects .gitignore
rg "TODO"

Processes#

Command	What it does
`htop`	Interactive process viewer
`ps aux --sort=-%mem \| head`	Top memory users
`kill -9 <pid>`	Stop a process that won't stop
`lsof -i :8080`	What's using port 8080?

Networking#

bash

# What's my public IP?
curl ifconfig.me

# Which ports are listening?
ss -tulpn

# Follow a log file as it grows
tail -f /var/log/syslog

History tricks#

!! repeats the last command, so sudo !! reruns it as root
Ctrl+R searches back through your history
cd - jumps back to the previous directory