Command line stuff cheatsheet

ls [options] [paths]

Switch	Description
-1	One entry per line
-l	Long view
-o	Long view (without groups)
-C	Multicolumn (sorted horizontally)
-x	Multicolumn (sorted vertically)
-F	Add / after directories
-G	Color

-R	Recurse
-a	Include hidden (dotfiles)
-A	Include hidden (but not . and ..)

Switch	Description
-r	reverse order
-S	sort by size
-t	sort by time modified
-u	sort by time accessed
-U	sort by time created
-c	sort by time status was changed
-h	Human-readable size (3k)

tail [-F | -f | -r] [-bN | -cN | -nN] [file ...]

-f	follow
-F	follow by filename (accounts for log rotation)
-r	Reverse order

-bN	N*512 bytes
-cN	N bytes
-nN	N lines
+N	Start from line N

sudo [options] <command>

-l	List allowed commands

-A	Use $SUDO_ASKPASS
-b	Run in background
-E	Preserve environment
-H	use target’s $HOME
-n	Don’t prompt for password
-P	Preserve group vector
-S	Read password from stdin

-C fd

Close all open file descriptors

-p prompt

Custom prompt (-p “%p password:”)

Switch	Description
-i [cmd]	Interactive shell without variables
-s [cmd]	Interactive shell
-u user	run as this user
-g group	run as this group

-v	revalidate timestamp for 5 mins
-k	invalidate timestamp
-K	just like -k

... | wc [options]

-c	Bytes
-l	Lines
-m	Characters (incl multi-byte)
-w	Words

grep [options] [pattern] [file ...]

Switch	Description
-A num	Print num lines of training context
-G	–basic-regexp (default)
-E	–extended-regexp
-P	–perl-regexp
-f file	–file (Get patterns for file)
-F	–fixed-strings
-h	–no-filename
-H	–with-filename
-l	–files-with-matches (just print filenames)
-L	–files-without-match
-r, -R	–recursive
-v	–invert-match
-i	–ignore-case

egrep  =>  grep -E
fgrep  =>  grep -F

perl -p -i -e 's/hello/HELLO/g' **/*