25 Linux commands for System Administrators

Productivity Admin Tools and Tips Advanced Computer Administration and Architecture on
January 19, 2014
If you are a System Administrator, you must know that the terminal is your single best friend.
Part of your task is, therefore, to master the Linux/Unix commands so that you can control
everything from the terminal itself. In this post, we look at some of the most popular and
powerful Linux commands.

man
The most important command in Linux, man shows information about other commands. You can
start by running man man to find more about the man command.

uptime
This command tells you how long your system has been running for.

w
This command shows who is logged into your system and what they are currently doing.

users
This shows you the usernames of users who are currently logged in to your system.

whoami
Prints the username of the user that you are currently logged in as.

grep
Finds text in files and outputs the neighbouring text along with file names. You can recursively
search in multiple files using -r. You can output only file names using -l.

less

If the case your output of a command or file contests are more your screen can accomodate, you
can view it in parts using less. The output of the previous command using less is the following.

cat
This helps in displaying, copying or combining text files.

pwd
Prints the absolute path of the current working directory.

ssh
This commands helps you connect to a remote host. You can either connect as
ssh remote_host
or
ssh remote_username@remote_host

scp
Copy files securely and remotely over servers.

sudo
Use this to run any command as the superuser (root). It is prefixed to the commands.

service
You can use it to perform tasks on different services, which runs scripts for the corresponding
services. For instance, to restart apache2 web server, we use service apache2 restart. A sudo is
prefixed to run as root because all users do not have permission to run the scripts.

Do note that some do not require sudo.

locate
Find files on your system by name.

chmod
Chmod changes file permissions in Linux. You can set which users or user groups have what
kind of access to a particular file. The topic of file permissions in Linux is a huge one in itself
and beyond the scope of this post. You can, however, look at this thread for further reading.

chown

Change ownership of a file to a user or a user group.

pkill
Kill a process using this command.

crontab
This is a program that is used to manage cron jobs in Linux. To list existing cron jobs, run
crontab -l.

alias
You use an alias when you are in need to shorten a command.

Aliases are not saved after you close the current terminal session. To do that you need to create
an alias in ~/.bashrc.

echo
Display or output text. Used in making bash scripts.

cmp
This command compares two files byte by byte.

mount

Mounts a filesystem. There are different options in this command that you can use which enables
you to mount even remote file systems.

pmap
This command is used to show the memory map of a process. You can get the process id (pid) by
running
ps aux | grep <process_name>
Then run pmap -x <pid>

wget
Downloads a file from a network.

ifconfig
This command is used to configure a networks interface. Just writing the command displays the
configuration.

With this, we come to the end of the list of the important commands. We hope that it was
educational for you. If you have any issues, feel free to comment below!