File Display Commands

cat → Show entire content
cat -A → Show non-printable characters

more → Paginate output
less → Same as more but allows navigation with arrow keys

head → Show top lines (default: 10)
tail → Show bottom lines (default: 10)

head -2 myfile
tail -2 myfile

Filters / Text Processing Input

• cut → Cut input
• awk → List by columns
• grep & egrep → Search by keyword
• sort → Sort in alphabetical order
• uniq → Remove duplicate lines
• wc → Word count (including lines)

cut Command Examples

• cut -c1 filename → First letter of each line
• cut -c1,2,4 filename → Characters 1, 2, and 4
• cut -c1-3 filename → Range: characters 1 to 3
• cut -c1-3,6-8 filename → Ranges: characters 1-3 and 6-8
• cut -b1-3 filename → Byte range 1 to 3
• cut -d: -f6 /etc/passwd → Field 6 using : delimiter
• cut -d: -f6-7 → Fields 6 and 7
• ls -l | cut -c2-4 → Extract character range 2 to 4 from ls output

awk Command Examples

• awk '{print $1}' file → Print 1st column of file
• ls -l | awk '{print $1, $3}' → Print 1st and 3rd columns from ls -l
• ls -l | awk '{print $NF}' → Print last column
• awk '/jerry/ {print}' file → Search for "jerry" and print matching lines
• awk -F: '{print $1}' /etc/passwd → Use : as delimiter, print 1st field
• echo "hello tom" | awk '{$2="adam"; print}' → Replace column 2 with "adam"
• awk 'length($0) > 15' file → Print lines longer than 15 characters

grep Command Examples

• grep keyword file → Search for keyword
• grep -c keyword file → Count matching lines
• grep -i keyword file → Ignore case
• grep -n keyword file → Show line numbers
• grep -v keyword file → Invert match (everything except keyword)
• grep keyword file | awk '{print $1}' → Pipe grep to awk to extract 1st column
• ls -l | grep keyword → Filter ls -l output by keyword
• egrep -i "keyword1|keyword2" file → Search for multiple keywords (case-insensitive)

sort Command Examples

• sort file → Sort alphabetically
• sort -r file → Sort in reverse order
• sort -u file → Sort and remove duplicates
• sort file | uniq → Same as above with explicit uniq
• sort file | uniq -d → Show only duplicate lines
• sort file | uniq -c → Count duplicates
• sort -k4 -n file → Sort by 4th field (numeric)
• ls -l | sort -k4 -n → Sort by size from ls -l

wc Command Examples

• wc -c filename → Byte count
• wc -w filename → Word count
• wc -l filename → Line count
• ls -l | wc -l → Count lines from ls -l
• wc -l filename → Count number of lines in file

cmp / diff

• diff → Compare files line by line
• cmp → Compare files byte by byte

tar / gzip

• tar cvf export.tar somedir → Compress directory
• tar xvf export.tar → Extract tar archive
• gzip export.tar → Compress with gzip
• gzip -d export.tar.gz → Decompress gzip archive

truncate Command

• truncate -s10 filename → Chop file to 10 bytes
• truncate -s60 filename → Extend file to 60 bytes

Combining & Splitting Files

• cat file1 file2 file3 > fileN → Combine multiple files into one