The Top 10 Most Useful Linux Commands: 8 - 10

One of the greatest benefits of Linux is its stability. But that stability doesn’t always apply to applications outside the kernel. Some applications can actually lock up. And when they do, you want to be able to get rid of them. The quickest way to get rid of locked up applications is with the kill/killall command. The difference between the two commands is that kill requires the PID (process ID number) and killall requires only the executable name.

Let’s say Firefox has locked up. To kill it with the kill command you would first need to locate the PID using the command ps aux|grep firefox command. Once you got the PID, you would issue kill PID (Where PID is the actual PID number). If you didn’t want to go through finding out the PID, you could issue the command killall firefox (although in some instances it will require killall firefox-bin). Of course, kill/killall do not apply (nor should apply) to daemons like Apache, Samba, etc.

How many times have you seen “RTFM”? Many would say that acronym stands for “Read the Fine* Manual” (*This word is open for variation not suitable for publication.) In my opinion, it stands for “Read the Fine Manpage.” Manpages are there for a reason — to help you understand how to use a command. Manpages are generally written with the same format, so once you gain an understanding of the format, you will be able to read (and understand) them all. And don’t underestimate the value of the manpage. Even if you can’t completely grasp the information given, you can always scroll down to find out what each command argument does. And the best part of using manpages is that when someone says “RTFM” you can say, I have “RTFMd.”

Without these two commands, using removable media or adding external drives wouldn’t happen. The mount/umount command is used to mount a drive (often labeled like /dev/sda) to a directory in the Linux file structure. Both mount and umount take advantage of the /etc/fstab file, which makes using mount/umount much easier. For instance, if there is an entry in the /etc/fstab file for /dev/sda1 that maps it to /data, that drive can be mounted with the command mount /data. Typically mount/umount must have root privileges (unless fstab has an entry allowing standard users to mount and unmount the device). You can also issue the mount command without arguments and you will see all drives that are currently mounted and where they’re mapped to (as well as the type of file system and the permissions).

These 10 Linux commands make Linux administration easier. There are other helpful commands, as well as commands that are used a lot more often than these. But the commands outlined here fall into the 'necessity' category. I don’t know about you, but I don’t go a day without using at least half of them!