Shell Commands Cheat Sheet

Frequently asked questions

Which shell commands are Linux-only and not on macOS?

The tool tags 12 of its 83 commands as not on a default macOS install: ss, lsblk, free, lscpu, lspci, fdfind, strace, perf, journalctl, wget, nmap and socat. That tag is the tool’s own list. A macOS command index (ss64.com) does list mount, sysctl, tcpdump and iostat, so those four are not tagged, and macOS ships its own dmesg, which needs root and has no -T flag. Their flags can still differ from the Linux versions: the iostat, top, sysctl, mount and dmesg examples are written for Linux and say so in the table. The git rows come with the Xcode Command Line Tools on a Mac.

What is the difference between Copy command name and Copy example?

Copy command name copies the bare command, such as grep or git commit. Copy example copies the whole example line, such as grep -i "error" logfile.log. Both report that they copied, or that the browser blocked the clipboard.

Are the examples safe to paste into a terminal?

Read each one first and change the paths. The list includes rm -rf tempdir/, which deletes a folder and everything in it without asking, and kill -9 1234, which stops a process with no chance to clean up. The tool only shows and copies examples; it never runs a command.

How many commands are on the list, and can I search or add to it?

There are 83: 34 beginner, 30 intermediate and 19 advanced, and the list is fixed. The search box narrows it: every word you type must appear in the command, its description, its example or its topic, so disk leaves 6 rows (df, du, lsblk, mount, iostat and dd). The search works with the skill level, topic and platform filters, and the line above the table says how many commands match.

How do I extract a tar.gz file?

tar -xzf archive.tar.gz unpacks it into the current folder: x extracts, z reads gzip and f names the file. The sheet’s Archiving row shows the reverse, tar -czf archive.tar.gz dir/, which packs the folder dir into archive.tar.gz. Add -C target/ to unpack somewhere else. For a .zip file, the unzip row gives unzip archive.zip -d target/.