jlevy/the-art-of-command-line

The Art of Command Line is a single-page guide that aims to help you become fluent on the command line. The basic idea is that everyday productivity for engineers improves a lot when they know how to drive a terminal well, and most people only learn enough to get by. This page collects notes and tips for both beginners and experienced users, with the explicit goals of breadth (everything important), specificity (concrete examples of common cases), and brevity (no digressions you could look up elsewhere). The content is organized into sections like Basics, Everyday use, Processing files and data, System debugging, One-liners, Obscure but useful, plus dedicated macOS only and Windows only sections. Topics covered in the visible portion include reading documentation with man, apropos, and help; output redirection with the greater-than and pipe symbols; file glob expansion and the difference between single and double quotes; Bash job management with ampersand, ctrl-z, ctrl-c, jobs, fg, bg, and kill; ssh and passwordless authentication; file management with ls, less, head, tail, ln, chown, chmod, du; basic network commands like ip, ifconfig, dig, traceroute; regular expressions and grep flags; package installation with apt-get, yum, dnf, or pacman; and a long list of Bash keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl-r to search history, ctrl-w to delete a word, and alt-period to recall previous arguments. The guide is written for interactive Bash on Linux, with portions applicable to macOS and other Unix systems, and is available in many translated versions linked at the top. You would use this when you want a fast reference to level up your command-line skills without reading a full book. The repository is essentially a long Markdown document maintained on GitHub, with topics covering Bash, Linux, macOS, Unix, and Windows. The full README is longer than what was provided.