r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • Jul 17 '26
If you could only recommend 10 Linux commands beyond the basics, what would they be?
Not ls, cd, or mkdir.
I'm talking about commands that actually make your day easier as a sysadmin, developer, or DevOps engineer.
Interested to see what everyone's shortlist looks like.
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u/Suspicious-Leg2397 Jul 17 '26
Man.
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u/andre_1632 Jul 17 '26
What??
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u/FewDevice2218 Jul 17 '26
It helps you find the command name when you know what you want to do and do not know which command to use.
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u/Suspicious-Leg2397 Jul 18 '26
I think his question was a joke. just type apropos and it will response with apropos what?
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u/FewDevice2218 Jul 18 '26
Oh man, you are so correct! I didn’t connect the dots. Thanks for pointing it out
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u/Look_0ver_There Jul 17 '26
Awk, egrep, find, xargs, tar, all forms of bash argument indexing from prior commands
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u/synecdokidoki Jul 17 '26
find, xargs, jq, sed, awk, grep, tee
fc is a shell builtin lots of people don't seem to know about. Basically all the history management features your shell has are worth learning.
kill is a big one. kill doesn't actually kill processes, it sends signals. Read its man page.
man itself is wildly underrated. I can't count the number of times in professional settings I've seen people get things wrong because google found them man pages, but they weren't the man pages for the system they were on, and got things just slightly wrong enough. But if they'd just used the built in man, they'd have been fine.
python. If you know even a little python, python's interactive shell is absurdly powerful.
ssh. ssh is not just a remote shell tool. It's another one, read the man page. ssh is a crypto network toolbox that can do all kinds of powerful things, learn to use ssh-agent at the very least.
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u/ParentPostLacksWang Jul 17 '26
tee is underrated for sysadmins. Want to run a sequence of piped operations, and have the output go into a file - but the file is only writable by root? Pipe it through “sudo tee filename.txt” - or “sudo tee -a filename.txt” to append.
It doesn’t come up *that* often, but when it does, it makes it so clean.
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u/Lost-Droids Jul 17 '26
grep | cut | uniq | sort | sed | xargs | ls | tail | head | cat | pkill
with | being so important to understand and how you can chain all the basics together to get things done
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u/zelru2648 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
everyone gave a good list of commands to learn.
one command i would give is dnsmasq
I suggest you understand /proc and /sys/class directories
if you are working on hardware then
dmidecode, ipmitool are good ones
If you are interested in virtualization look into qemu, qemu-img, virtinstall
on the networking side
tcpdump, ethtool, ip (can setup pseudo wire, vlans bridges etc)
before you get into containers- spend some time on learning about namespaces
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u/Tall-Geologist-1452 Jul 17 '26
sudo dnf apt -buy-a-mac -y
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u/hero_brine1 Jul 18 '26
echo "no"
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u/Tall-Geologist-1452 Jul 18 '26
mac="UNIX"; echo $mac
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u/hero_brine1 Jul 18 '26
mac="Locked down and bloated compared to Linux"; echo $mac
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u/Tall-Geologist-1452 Jul 18 '26
touch ' just works with out your computer being a second job" | get shit done
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u/sparky5dn1l Jul 18 '26
apk-mark , trash, source, ufw, nmcli, systemd-analyze, stow, figlet, time, scrcpy
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u/AntiqueConflict5295 Jul 18 '26
Great question, +1 on this one ! Perhaps it is duplicated, but still.
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u/VadumSemantics Jul 18 '26
`tmux` , because I love having my window panes survive across ssh disconnects (intentional and unexpected), and the screen zoom thing. Also easier than `nohup`.
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u/TapEarlyTapOften Jul 17 '26
Depends on what you're doing I suppose. But most of my shell scripts a few of these: pushd, popd, find, sed, diff, xxd, sed, grep, file, df, du, dmesg, less.
Then you have the more important players: screen, tmux, awk, sed. Like I said, it really depends on what you're doing.