What are some commands that every Unix admin should know backwards and forwards?

[Arkitech]

I'm slowly learning about Unix for my new job, I'm making progress but I'm curious about commands that veteran admins use on a daily basis. So for you guys who spend a lot of time on Unix what are some commands that use on a daily basis?


Thanks

 

[Descartes]

All of them. Seriously. Granted, there will be some things you'll have to look up in the manpage, but you as an admin you should be versed in literally everything.

 

[Arkitech]

Originally posted by: Descartes
All of them. Seriously. Granted, there will be some things you'll have to look up in the manpage, but you as an admin you should be versed in literally everything.

but are there some commands that you use more than others?

 

[kamper]

cd and ls are typically the ones I use the most

Books could be (and have been) written about this, but you might start with the thread stickied at the top of the Operating Systems forum which talks about all sorts of useful stuff. It might not start with the absolute basics, but lots of the 'mentors' in that thread have links in their sigs to basic tutorials.

 

[notfred]

Decartes is right, the question is like asking "What are some cockpit controls that every jet pilot should know backwards and forwards?"

Any qualified pilot would know all of them, even if he doesn't use some of them very often.

But what gets used the most? That probably depends on what you're doing. When I'm using unix, I use vi and gcc more than anything else, probably.

 

[nweaver]

basic vi

|
less
man
sed/awk
for/if/while
chmod/chown

 

[jdport]

Originally posted by: nweaver
basic vi

|
less
man
sed/awk
for/if/while
chmod/chown

don't forget grep!

tar is another good one. Tar has a lot of uses. My favorite is for moving a directory without losing all the file permissions/ownerships (cp -R will change ownership of the files to the person running the command).

You should know perl or bash shell scripting or preferably both.