Linux Terminal Shortcuts

Posted in diy, linux, resources and tips, tutorial, ubuntu linux on Mar 19, 2009

I came across this great article full of “Linux Terminal Shortcuts” this morning and thought I would share. Well the title of the post was actually “50 ways to impress geeky linux friends”, but I think there were some good tidbits in there for people using linux that might not know how powerful the command line is. Although it requires a bit more effort than the dumbed down “point and click” world – I think you might find these features far more useful (and advanced) than any version of Windows.

Out of the 50 tips, here are the ones I picked out to be most useful Linux Terminal Shortcuts:

Rip a DVD: You wouldn’t think it would be this easy, but you can rip a DVD on the command line with the following: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/cdrom_image.iso

Encrypt your files: Easily encrypy any files from prying eyes using this command: gpg -c filename.doc, and simply enter your password twice. Then to decrypt them later, just run this command: gpg filename.doc.gpg and enter the password you used.

Block a Web Site: Kids use your laptop a lot? Boyfriend spending too much time on MySpace? You can block any web site in linux quickly and easily. Just run this command to open a file: gedit /etc/hosts, and then add 127.0.0.1 website.com one by one to block any web sites you want!

Scan Wireless Networks: If you want to scan for all available wireless networks, run this command: iwlist scan, and get much more info on each than you would ever get in Windows.

Convert text to HTML: Linux shines in it’s ability to process information, and particularly in conversion utilities. For example, convert a text file into HTML like this: recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html

Schedule a download: Say you want to download an 800MB file but want to do it when everyone is asleep? Just run this command: echo ‘wget url’ | at 01:00