10 useful Linux commands

Here's a list of 10 commands that may come handy when using the command line in Linux.

Search for all files modified in the last n days containing a specific text in their name

find DIR -mtime -N -name "*TEXT*"

For example:

find ~ -mtime -5 -name "*log*"

Will display all the files modified in the past five days that include the text 'log' in their filename.

Determine which processes use the most memory

ps aux | sort -nk 4 | tail

Will show the first 10 processes that use the most memory, using ascendant sorting. Alternately:

ps aux | sort -nrk 4 | head

Figure 1: output of PS aux | sort-NRK 4 | HEAD

Will show the first 10 processes using most memory, using descendent sorting (see figure 1 ).

Display the username which is currently logged in

whoami

Show Date using format Modifiers

date +"%H:%M:%S"

Figure 2: showing date in format month, day, year

Will
Output Time in format hour: minute: second. You can use any format
Specifiers explained in the man page. The double quotes are required in
Case you need to use spaces (see figure 2 ).

Figure 3: output of finger $ user

Show info about a specific user

finger $USER

Show disk usage separately for each partition

df -h

The-H switch will tell DF to show human-readable sizes (kb, MB, and GB when it is the case)

df -B 1K

Will show sizes in kilobytes.

Show which modules are loaded

lsmod

Add or remove a module to/from the Linux Kernel

modprobe MODULE
modprobe -r MODULE

Search for a file using locate

locate FILENAME

Will search the locate database (created with updatedb) for any path or file which contains filename.

Change the encoding of a text file

iconv -f INITIAL_ENCODING -t DESIRED_ENCODING filename

For example:

iconv -f ISO-8859-16 -t UTF-8 myfile.txt

Will change the encoding of myfile.txt from ISO-8859-16 (Romanian) to UTF-8.

This article originally appeared on tuxarena
.