Linux Shell/Terminal Commands

Linux can run in a shell/terminal mode and a lot of difficult tasks are easier to execute in this mode. One such task is searching for a type of file and all instances of it in a directory tree and moving them to another directory.

Switch to the directory where you’d like to begin and then the syntax is…
find -name *.jpg -exec mv {} /jpgDirectory \;

The ; terminates the line and \ tells Linux to ignore the next character and the {} uses the found filename.

Another common task is joining files and sorting them as you do it.

cat file1 file2 | sort > output.txt

Another common task is mounting a drive. The syntax is like..
sudo mkdir mydrive
sudo mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 mydrive

to unmount first exit the directory tree of the device then…
sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Simple huh?

To install Java…
first: sudo apt-get update

second check to see if java is installed: java -version

third install java: sudo apt-get install default-jre

fourth and/or the jdk: sudo apt-get install default-jdk

Often after uninstalling a program you’ll get message in the terminal from the apt-get program that says “The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:” and it will give you a list.
You can safely remove any of these packages using…

sudo apt-get remove thepackagename

or you can do it all at once with…

sudo apt-get autoremove

other useful commands are…
sudo apt-get update [updates the system]
and
sudo apt-get clean

Another useful tool is grep which allows you to search files for text. The syntax is pretty simple.

grep -r -i “hello”

will search for the text “hello” within the current and recursive directories ignoring the case of the word. You can allow follow the command with specified file types or directories to search. And as always you can output the results to another file like in the example below.

grep -r -i “hello” > search.txt