- Table of Contents
- Copyright
- About the Lead Authors
- About the Contributing Authors
- Acknowledgments
- Tell Us What You Think!
- Introduction
- I. Red Hat Linux Installation and User Services
- Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat Linux
- Chapter 2. Installation of Your Red Hat System
- Chapter 3. LILO and Other Boot Managers
- Chapter 4. Configuring the X Window System, Version 11
- Chapter 5. Window Managers
- Chapter 6. Connecting to the Internet
- Chapter 7. IRC, ICQ, and Chat Clients
- Chapter 8. Using Multimedia and Graphics Clients
- II. Configuring Services
- Chapter 9. System Startup and Shutdown
- Chapter 10. SMTP and Protocols
- Chapter 11. FTP
- Chapter 12. Apache Server
- Chapter 13. Internet News
- Chapter 14. Domain Name Service and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
- Chapter 15. NIS: Network Information Service
- Chapter 16. NFS: Network Filesystem
- Chapter 17. Samba
- III. System Administration and Management
- Chapter 18. Linux Filesystems, Disks, and Other Devices
- Chapter 19. Printing with Linux
- Chapter 20. TCP/IP Network Management
- Chapter 21. Linux System Administration
- Chapter 22. Backup and Restore
- Chapter 23. System Security
- IV. Red Hat Development and Productivity
- Chapter 24. Linux C/C++ Programming Tools
- Chapter 25. Shell Scripting
- Chapter 26. Automating Tasks
- Chapter 27. Configuring and Building Kernels
- Chapter 28. Emulators, Tools, and Window Clients
- V. Appendixes
- A. The Linux Documentation Project
- B. Top Linux Commands and Utilities
- C. The GNU General Public License
- D. Red Hat Linux RPM Package Listings
Appendix B. Top Linux Commands and Utilities
In This Appendix
- General Guidelines
- The List
This appendix is not meant to replace the man pages and does not detail all of the options for each command. You will find most of the information you need in the man pages for these programs or, in the case of a shell operator such as > or <, in the man pages for the shell commands. This appendix is designed to give you a feel for the commands and a brief description as to what they do. In most cases, more parameters are available than are shown here.
Many descriptions also have examples. If these examples are not self-evident, an explanation is provided. This is not an exhaustive list—Red Hat Linux comes with many more commands—but these are the most common, and you will find yourself using them over and over again.
To keep things simple, the commands are listed in alphabetical order; however, the list starts with what are usually the 10 most common commands—they are also listed alphabetically. This list of essential commands could be compared to a list of the top 10 words spoken by the cavemen when searching for food and a mate:
- cat
- cd
- cp
- find
- grep
- ls
- more
- rm
- vi
- who
General Guidelines | Next Section

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