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The Linux Command Reference

A free, bilingual (English / Norwegian) guide that teaches the Linux command line, chapter by chapter.

Welcome to The Linux Command Reference — a free, open, bilingual guide that teaches the Linux terminal from scratch. It has 16 short chapters, each covering a small set of commands.

How to use it: if you are new to the terminal, start at Chapter 0 — Getting to the Terminal and read in order. If you know what you are looking for, jump straight to a command from the menu.

Languages: every chapter exists in both English and Norwegian. Use the language switch in the top right to toggle between them.

  1. Getting to the Terminal How to open a terminal in GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce and Cinnamon, on Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint.
  2. About the Distros The Debian, Red Hat and Arch families explained: package manager, init system, default shell and release cadence.
  3. Navigating the Filesystem Move around the filesystem with pwd, ls, cd, find and locate. List files, change directories and search by name, type or age.
  4. Files & Directories Create, copy, move and delete files and directories with mkdir, touch, cp, mv, rm and ln.
  5. Reading & Editing Files View and edit files with cat, less, head, tail, nano and echo.
  6. Permissions & Ownership Understand and change file permissions with chmod, chown, chgrp, umask and sudo.
  7. Processes & System Manage running programs with ps, top, htop, kill, uptime and free.
  8. Package Management Install, search, update and remove software with apt, dnf and pacman.
  9. Text Processing Search and transform text with grep, sed, awk, cut, sort, uniq and wc.
  10. Archives & Compression Create and extract archives and compressed files with tar, gzip, zip, unzip and xz.
  11. Networking Check network connectivity with ping, ip, curl, wget, dig and ss.
  12. Remote Access & File Transfer Connect to remote machines and transfer files with ssh, scp, rsync and sftp.
  13. Disks & Storage Check disk space and usage with df, du and lsblk, plus a guide to ext4, btrfs, xfs and swap.
  14. Shell Essentials Pipes, redirection, globbing, environment variables, history, alias and tmux.
  15. Services & Logs Control background services and read logs with systemctl and journalctl.
  16. Automation Schedule tasks with cron and crontab, and write simple bash scripts.