Terminal Commands List (with Options & Examples) [Practical Focus]

A practical reference list of commonly used terminal (shell) commands organized by description, main options, and usage examples. This guide focuses on the essentials you’ll need to quickly remember. It covers commands that work on both Linux and macOS, with additional helpful macOS-specific commands. For more detailed information, use man command-name or command --help.

Usage Tips

• Safety first: For destructive commands like rm -rf, always verify the target and path before executing. Use the -i (interactive/confirm) option to prevent accidental deletion.

• Use manual pages: Check man command-name or command --help for detailed information and options. Consult the manual first when you need help.

• Power of combination: Using pipes (|) and redirects (>, >>) to chain commands together allows you to work more efficiently. Example: cat file.txt | grep "error" > errors.txt

• Tab completion: Press Tab while typing a command or filename to auto-complete. This saves time with long paths and complex names.

• Command history: Use arrow keys to navigate previous commands. Use history to see a list, and !n to re-execute a specific history entry.

• Wildcards: Use * and ? to specify multiple files at once. Example: ls *.txt

• Interrupt commands: Press Ctrl + C to stop a running command, or Ctrl + Z to pause it.

• Command aliasing: Create shorter names for frequently used commands with alias. Example: alias ll='ls -lAh'

• File permissions: Check permissions with ls -l, and change them with chmod or chown.

Basic Operations / Navigation

File / Directory Operations

What is a symbolic link? A symbolic link (symlink, soft link) is a special file that acts like a “shortcut” to another file or directory. If the target is moved or deleted, the link becomes broken, but symbolic links can be created across different filesystems. In contrast, a hard link only works within the same filesystem, and even if the original is deleted, other hard links still provide access to the content. Create symbolic links with ln -s and hard links with ln.

Search / Text Processing

What is a stream editor (sed)? sed is called a “stream editor” and can automatically edit and transform text data from files or stdin according to rules you specify. For example, it can “replace all occurrences of a string,” “delete specific lines,” or “extract lines matching a pattern” without opening the file directly.

• Use it like sed 's/search/replace/g' file.txt, where s means “substitute”
• Add the -i option to edit the file in-place (use -i.bak to create a backup)
• Regular expressions are supported for complex pattern matching and bulk editing

Examples:

• sed 's/foo/bar/g' file.txt … Replace all “foo” with “bar” and display
• sed -i '' 's/foo/bar/g' file.txt … Directly edit file.txt to replace “foo” with “bar”

Process / System Information

Compression / Archive

Network / Remote

Useful macOS Commands