The 50 Most Popular Linux & Terminal Commands - Full Course for Beginners

Learn the 50 most popular Linux commands from Colt Steele. All these commands work on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment. 🐱

✏️ Colt Steele developed this course.

⭐️ Course Contents ⭐️
⌨️ (0:00:00) Introduction
⌨️ (0:04:37) Why use the command line?
⌨️ (0:06:56) The world of operating systems
⌨️ (0:10:56) What is Linux?
⌨️ (0:16:58) Shells and Bash
⌨️ (0:19:28) Setup For Linux Users
⌨️ (0:20:28) Setup For Mac Users
⌨️ (0:21:05) Setup For Windows (WSL)
⌨️ (0:29:43) Using The Terminal
⌨️ (0:31:12) whoami
⌨️ (0:32:34) man
⌨️ (0:33:40) clear
⌨️ (0:36:42) intro to options
⌨️ (0:39:05) pwd
⌨️ (0:41:07) ls
⌨️ (0:49:21) cd
⌨️ (1:00:40) mkdir
⌨️ (1:06:33) touch
⌨️ (1:12:03) rmdir
⌨️ (1:13:05) rm
⌨️ (1:21:26) open
⌨️ (1:23:55) mv
⌨️ (1:27:51) cp
⌨️ (1:31:56) head
⌨️ (1:33:02) tail
⌨️ (1:35:27) date
⌨️ (1:36:02) redirecting standard output
⌨️ (1:41:48) cat
⌨️ (1:46:15) less
⌨️ (1:49:17) echo
⌨️ (1:51:38) wc
⌨️ (1:53:52) piping
⌨️ (1:56:43) sort
⌨️ (2:01:09) uniq
⌨️ (2:06:59) expansions
⌨️ (2:17:08) diff
⌨️ (2:21:01) find
⌨️ (2:32:10) grep
⌨️ (2:36:52) du
⌨️ (2:40:55) df
⌨️ (2:44:04) history
⌨️ (2:47:32) ps
⌨️ (2:51:50) top
⌨️ (2:54:02) kill
⌨️ (3:00:13) killall
⌨️ (3:01:37) jobs, bg, and fg
⌨️ (3:09:40) gzip
⌨️ (3:12:18) gunzip
⌨️ (3:15:27) tar
⌨️ (3:23:36) nano
⌨️ (3:31:17) alias
⌨️ (3:42:48) xargs
⌨️ (3:50:57) ln
⌨️ (4:01:49) who
⌨️ (4:03:47) su
⌨️ (4:08:32) sudo
⌨️ (4:18:36) passwd
⌨️ (4:21:54) chown
⌨️ (4:31:08) Understanding permissions
⌨️ (4:47:15) chmod

🎉 Thanks to our Champion and Sponsor supporters:
👾 Wong Voon jinq
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👾 Katia Moran
👾 BlckPhantom
👾 Nick Raker
👾 Otis Morgan
👾 DeezMaster
👾 AppWrite

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[rohangupta]

Colt is nostalgic for me, he started my web dev journey . Thanks Colt

[ernstgoldman]

In spite of the fact that computer technology is changing very rapidly and sometimes in very drastic ways, the UNIX/Linux fluency still remains so relevant. I am amazed that Unix knowledge I acquired in my college days (25+ years ago) still carries me thru in various jobs. I've changed so many languages and frameworks over the years, they become obsolete or not in demand, but knowledge of Linux is still crucial. Same for SQL. If nothing else -data structures, Linux commands and SQL should be in your foundation.

[Hwyadylaw]

If you really want to understand the terminal, you have to look into it's history, going back to physical computer terminals, to teleprinters/teletypewriters (TTY) .
A CTRL combination like ^Z or ^C actually sends a character code to the shell. These are called control characters (hence the CTRL key), as they don't represent graphical characters to be printed, but commands to control the device outputting the text. You can see them if you look at an ASCII table. For example ^G sends code 7, telling the receiver to ring a bell (a physical one originally). ^H (or the backspace key) moves the writing head back one character, which would let you fill in a space or print a character on top of another character, like O [Backspace] ^ would print Ô.

^C sends the "end of text" character. ^J sends the "line feed" character, which on typewriters would feed the next line to the writing head, without moving the carriage back to the beginning of the new line. To start writing the new line you'd then also need the "carriage return" control character ^M. This is why new lines are LFCR (line feed carriage return) on Windows. On Unix-like systems, only the line feed character is used.
You may be familiar with the C escape sequences for these control codes: \n (line feed) \r (carriage return) \0 (null) \t (horizontal tab)
One thing I love is that the Delete code is in binary. This is because it was designed for punched cards/tape, where it would overwrite any other character by punching a hole in every position, in contrast to \0 (null) - which was supposed to be ignored and wouldn't do anything.

[luelo]

Colt is the one who helped me to start my software engineering career. Its been 5 years and now I able to earn a decent salary and feed my wife and daughter. Thanks, Colt! I love you, man! May God bless you! ♥️

[sharongershoni]

Colt is the best teacher I have ever had. His teaching is expansive while thorough, and so generous - accessible and inclusive.

[AdriixA]

I'm mostly using this to refresh my knowledge on things I already know just in case but it's made a lot of things much clearer. This is a wonderful video, thank you so much.

[neverhomepnw]

I love how slow paced it is. A lot videos (even paid ones) feel rushed and use terms which can throw me off. Truly appreciate all the hard work you did. Mad respect to you Colt.

[mohitdas]

Colt Steele is one of my best coding teacher out there and also a man who helped me to start my programming journey. Thanks Colt and I love your cat Rusty ❤️🙂

[zekeking]

Colt's videos really let me hit the ground running at my first job where I had to interact with the terminal and use Git. Love his stuff. P.S. freeCodeCamp you should do even more collabs like this :)

[BinaHejazi]

Hey mate this is by far one of the most useful, best explained and discussed Linux shell commands tutorial I have ever seen. The course content makes it even more superior.
This is an A-Class production mate.
WELL DONE AND MANY THANKS INDEED!!

[Android-]

Colt Steele is the absolute best!
I recently started in programming with his web development course. It's very in depth yet so easy to understand.

[mikeg]

Just watched the entire thing… so well done, interesting and not intimidating. It’s been a while so some was review and some new. Thanks so much for your efforts.

[chivan-]

Amazing video, honestly it can be hard to just sit down and follow along and take notes on videos like these but seriously; watched the thing from start to finish, took 3 pages worth of notes, and didn’t feel burnt out. Thank you to everyone involved!

[samarth.saxena]

Really nice lecture. I’d really recommend others to watch this who are starting with linux.
I think you could have included setfacl and getfacl too, since you have already covered ownership and right permissions in this video lecture.

[latasha]

Thank you Colt. It is really a great help to me as I was looking for something on Linux commands for couple of days.

[robbs]

I love his teaching style! Makes things so fluid and easy to understand. Segways from one thing to another flawlessly so it just sticks in your head better. Awesome!

[Mega_Casual]

Using Octal, an easy way to remember permissions is: R=4, W=2, X=1. Then if you add them by octal number it combines those values. Ex- 4 is read only, 6 is R and W, 7 is RWX. 5 is RX. 2 is W.

[rajanAdam]

as soon as i saw Colt in thumbnail i knew it’s gonna be amazing. Colt Steele you are responsible for thousands of web developer around the world.

[LL-ueek]

Amazingly it lasted 5 hours. I took good amount of effort on our side to finish it, and one can only imagine the work you put in to prepare the video. It begins to get my foot in the door; and thank you for sharing your knowledge! Say hi to and thank your cat for participating in the lecture.

[MrCWoodhouse]

Wow! Almost 1M views. This was an epic 5 hours of explanation. Thank you, Colt. You put a lot of things together for me that I had learned in a scattershot fashion. I look forward to exploring your bibliography.