Hungerford Web Design Blog

Many people are now using either dedicated boxes or virtual dedicated hosting. Knowing your way around the filesystem and how to manipulate it is key to running a good, stable, secure service. It also makes takes as a website owner much easier and quicker.

Here is a list of common Linux and/or UNIX commands which may come in handy:

Files and Folders:

cd - change directory. E.g. cd /home will take you into the “home directory”
cp - copy. E.g cp readme.txt /home/user would copy the text file to the user directory
mv - move. E.g mv readme.txt /home/user/readme.txt would move the file (can also be used to rename the file: mv readme.txt readme2.txt)
mkdir - make a new directory. E.g mkdir /home/user/new_folder would create the directory “new_folder”
rm - remove/delete. E.g rm readme.txt would delete readme.txt. To prevent prompting (are you sure?…) you would use rm -rf. This would also be used to remove an empty directory (if the directory had files in it you would have to use rm -rf)
rmdir - remove directory. E.g rmdir /home/user/new_folder would remove the directory “new_folder”

Zipping/Tarring/bzipping:

To tar/gzip a file: cd /your/files/location “tar zxvf filename.tar.gz” or “tar zxvf filename2.tgz”
To untar a *.tar: cd /your/file/location “tar xvf filename.tar”
To unzip a *.gz (gzip): cd /your/file/location “gzip -d filename.gz”
To unzip a *.bz2 (bzip2): cd /your/file/location “bzip2 -d filename.bz2″

If you would like to know how to do anything in particular on your system, feel free to ask in comments/email and I will get it added.

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