On 18 Dec 2005 22:18:51 -0800, zcarenow@yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm new to Fedora(RH) and was wondering which are the line commands
> that are commonly used? Also, people have said that alot of times it is
> easier to do things by using command line. Thus, i want to know the
> most commonly used commands thru the command line prompt. Thanks.

What are the most commonly used words in a conversation.
Depends on what the conversation is about.

The command
man man
is a very good first step.

How about man, ls, cd, rm, pwd

Want the list of commands?
man -k * | grep \(1

What does the section (number) mean in the man pages?
1 User commands
2 System Calls
3 Subroutines
4 Devices
5 File Formats
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous
8 System Administration
n New

You might want to read
! bash script introduction documentation
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
! bash script advanced documentation
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html

Chapter 4 might help here
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.g

See:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0764...24#reader-link



zcarenow@yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm new to Fedora(RH) and was wondering which are the line commands
> that are commonly used? Also, people have said that alot of times it is
> easier to do things by using command line. Thus, i want to know the
> most commonly used commands thru the command line prompt. Thanks.
>

On 18 Dec 2005, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.redhat, in article
<1134973131.839395.209200@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups. com>,
zcarenow@yahoo.com wrote:

>I'm new to Fedora(RH) and was wondering which are the line commands
>that are commonly used?

I'm new to speaking $LANGUAGE - what are the most common words used? Is
that a useful question? As Bit Twister mentions, it depends on what you
are doing.

[compton ~]$ ls `echo $PATH | tr ':' ' '` | grep -Evc '(:|^$)'
1314
[compton ~]$ echo $HISTSIZE
1000
[compton ~]$ history | sed 's/^......//' | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//' |
cut -d' ' -f1 | sort -u | wc -l
98
[compton ~]$ ^-u | wc -l^| uniq -c | sort -n | tail -4
history | sed 's/^......//' | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//' | cut -d' ' -f1
| sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -4
71 vi
75 ls
97 grep
218 less
[compton ~]$

In this xterm, I seem to be reading a lot. The first command above looks
to see how many commands are in my PATH. The next command show that my
shell setup remembers the last 1000 commands I've used (where a command
is defined as everything up to the point where I press the Enter key).
The next command breaks those commands down into the individual parts,
and counts how many _different_ commands I've used is those last 1000.
98 is a bit high for me - it's normally averaging closer to 75. The next
command (beginning with the caret) is a command substitution - replace
the stuff between the carets with what follows (the shell retypes the
modified command for me). In another xterm, I see

[compton ~]$ history | sed 's/^......//' | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//' |
cut -d' ' -f1 | sort -u | wc -l
73
[compton ~]$ ^-u | wc -l^| uniq -c | sort -n | tail -4
history | sed 's/^......//' | tr '|' '\n' | sed 's/^ *//' | cut -d' ' -f1
| sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -4
45 sed
69 grep
117 less
446 vi
[compton ~]$

>Also, people have said that alot of times it is easier to do things by
>using command line.

The usual answer I give is "where is the icon to get the data I just showed
above?" A GUI will do what the GUI author thinks you needed. Beyond that,
you're on your own. The nice thing about command lines is that you can
chain commands together to do something - perhaps something that no one
ever saw the need to do, but you can do this. Hmmm...

[compton ~]$ history | grep -c '|'
172
[compton ~]$

>Thus, i want to know the most commonly used commands thru the command
>line prompt. Thanks.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 gferg ldp 31540 Jul 27 2000 Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO

Start there, then go to the LDP (http://tldp.org/guides.html) and grab
copies of the Bash-Beginners-Guide, Linux-Dictionary, Pocket-Linux-Guide,
and abs-guide. Each one of those guides is a complete book.

413596 Sep 5 11:53 Bash-Beginners-Guide.html.tar.gz
1607592 Apr 8 2005 Linux-Dictionary.html.tar.gz
60514 Apr 22 2005 Pocket-Linux-Guide.html.tar.gz
490015 Oct 21 06:23 abs-guide.html.tar.gz

That's the HTML versions - they're also available in PostScript, PDF, and
raw ASCII text. These books _could_ be on your system already. The blurb
on the 'abs-guide' is

Announcing the version 3.7 release of the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide."
This e-book tutorial and reference is the equivalent of a 672-page print book
With 317 illustrative examples (including such goodies as an an anti-spammer
script), the book covers virtually every aspect of scripting (10/21/05)

Old guy

Actually, i was trying to find out the most commonly used commands for
day to day activity to get things done. I appreciate the detail though.

zcarenow@yahoo.com wrote:
> Actually, i was trying to find out the most commonly used commands for
> day to day activity to get things done. I appreciate the detail though.
>

Since I'm a beginner, I guess maybe I can be of help and probably point
out extremely obvious things you already know...

Commands like:

man - manual page for any command
ls - directory listing
cp - copying files
mv - moving files
cd - changing directories
rpm - used along with options to install packages
yum - used to install packages if you have setup yum (you probably want
to install yumex so you have a graphical way to install and update packages)
grep - when you are listing things allows you to limit the list to
values with a certain string, i.e., ls | grep xxxxx
emacs/vi/gedit - various editors you may have to edit files
sudo - used to give you root access for a single command (you need to
add your user to the sudoers file)
su - - gives you root access until you exit the root access

There are a variety of other commands, but those are some off the top of
my head. If you need to do something specific, a Google search (or
specific post to a newsgroup or message board) will often yield the result.

On 19 Dec 2005, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.redhat, in article
<1135047007.858854.81440@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.c om>,
zcarenow@yahoo.com wrote:

>Actually, i was trying to find out the most commonly used commands for
>day to day activity to get things done. I appreciate the detail though.

Got news for you.

That is my day to day activity. While I run X, I do so to have a lot
of terminals open so I can type commands in any of them. There isn't
one single icon on the desktop - and only three dropdown menus that I
may occasionally use. A good quote to remember is

A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in.

Much of UNIX is text based - from the /etc/inittab file that is the first
thing the kernel looks for when it boots, to the S00halt script which is
the very last thing run at shutdown.

On your system, run the command 'echo $PATH' and you'll see a list of
directories where commands reside. Assuming you've left your system up
long enough for 'makewhatis' to run (it's usually scheduled at around
4 AM), change to the various directories, and in each, run the command

whatis * > /tmp/name.of.directory.contents

where name.of.directory.contents is the name of the directory you are
in. Depending on how big things are, this may take a minute or two. Then
look at each file in turn. You'll see something like:

[compton ~]$ head /tmp/bin.contents
arch (1) - print machine architecture
ash (1) - a shell
ash [bsh] (1) - a shell
basename (1) - strip directory and suffix from filenames
basename [File::Basename] (3) - extract just the filename from a path
bash (1) - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
bash [sh] (1) - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
cat (1) - concatenate files and print on the standard output
chgrp (1) - change the group ownership of files
chmod (1) - change the access permissions of files
[compton ~]$

In my reply, I listed a HOWTO and four books you ought to be looking at.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 gferg ldp 61734 Aug 31 2000 DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO

That's another one.

Old guy