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(32) Common external commands

Most of these commands will operate on a one or more named files, or will operate on a stream of data from standard input if no files are named.

Listing, copying and moving files and directories

ls *

list contents of a directory, or list details of files and directories.

mkdir; rmdir *

Make and Remove directories.

rm; cp; mv *

Remove (delete), Copy and Move (rename) files and directories

touch *

Update the last modifed timestamp on a file, to make it appear to have just been written.

tee

Make a duplicate copy of a data stream - used in pipelines to send one copy to a log file and a second copy on to another program. (Think plumbing).

echo *

Echo the arguments to standard output -- used for messages from scripts. Some versions of "sh", and all csh/ksh/bash shells internalized "echo".

cat *

Copy and concatenate files; display contents of a file

head, tail *

Display the beginning of a file, or the end of it.

cut

Extract selected fields from each line of a file. Often awk is easier to use, even though it is a more complex program.

wc

Count lines, words and characters in the input.

compress; gzip, zip; tar *

Various utilities to compress/uncompress individual files, combine multiple files into a single archive, or do both.

sort *

Sort data alphabetically or numerically.

grep *

Search a file for lines containing character patterns. The patterns can be simple fixed text, or very complex regular expressions.

uniq *

Remove duplicate lines, and generate a count of repeated lines.

wc *

Count lines, words and characters in a file.

date *

Display the current date and time (flexible format). Useful for conditional execution based on time, and for timestamping output.

ps *

List the to a running processes.

kill *

Send a signal (interrupt) to a running process.

id

Print the user name and UID and group of the current user (e.g. to distinguish priviledged users before attempting to run programs which may fail with permission errors)

who

Display who is logged on the system, and from where they logged in.

uname *

Display information about the system, OS version, hardware architecture etc.

mail *

Send mail, from a file or standard input, to named recipients. Since scripts are often used to automate long-running background jobs, sending notification of completion by mail is a common trick.

logger

Place a message in the central system logging facility. Scripts can submit messages with all the facilities available to compiled programs.

hostname

Display the hostname of the current host - usful to keep track of where your programs are running

test; [ *

The conditional test, used extensively in scripts, is also an external program which evaluates the expression given as an argument and returns true (0) or false (1) exit status. The name "[" is a link to the "test" program, so a line like:
if [ -w logfile ]
actually runs a program "[", with arguments "-w logfile ]", and returns a true/false value to the "if" command.

awk *

A pattern matching and data manipulation utility, which has its own scripting language. It also duplicates much functionality from 'sed','grep','cut','wc', etc.

sed *

Stream Editor. A flexible editor which operates by applying editing rules to every line in a data stream in turn.

tr

Transliterate - perform very simple single-character edits on a file.

find *

Search the filesystem and find files matching certain criteria (name pattern, age, owner, size, last modified etc.)

xargs *

Apply multiple filename arguments to a named command and run it.

diff *

Compare two files and list the differences between them.

basename pathname

Returns the base filename portion of the named pathname, stripping off all the directories

dirname pathname

Returns the directory portion of the named pathname, stripping off the filename

expr *

The "expr" command takes an numeric or text pattern expression as an argument, evaluates it, and returns a result to stdout. The original Bourne shell had no built-in arithmetic operators. E.g.
expr 2 + 1
expr 2 '*' '(' 21 + 3 ')'
Used with text strings, "expr" can match regular expressions and extract sub expressions. Similar functionality can be achived with sed. e.g.
expr SP99302L.Z00 : '[A-Z0-9]\{4\}\([0-9]\{3\}\)L\.*'

dc

Desk Calculator - an RPN calculator, using arbitrary precision arithmetic and user-specified bases. Useful for more complex arithmetic expressions than can be performed internally or using expr

bc

A preprocessor for dc which provides infix notation and a C-like syntax for expressions and functions.

paste

Merge lines from multiple files into tab-delimited columns.

join

Perform a join (in the relational database sense) of lines in two sorted input files.