100 Useful Command-Line Utilities

by Oliver; 2014

1. Introduction

In An Introduction to the Command-Line (on Unix-like systems) ^[1], which I'll borrow heavily from in this article, we covered my subjective list of the 20 most important command line utilities. In case you forgot, it was:

• pwd
• ls
• cd
• mkdir
• echo
• cat
• cp
• mv
• rm
• man
• head
• tail
• less
• more
• sort
• grep
• which
• chmod
• history
• clear

These are indispensable but, for anything more than the basics, a vocabulary of about 100 commands is where you want to be. Here are my picks for the top 100(ish) commands. I'll briefly introduce each one below along with a quick use case or hint.

A few of the commands, mostly clustered at the end of the article, are not standard shell commands and you have to install them yourself (see apt-get, brew, yum). When this is the case, I make a note of it.

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^{[1] Note: Unix-like systems include Linux and Macintosh ↑}

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