Unix cheat sheets

Posted by Peter J. Jones on September 17, 2012

Peteris Krumins is at it again with two *nix cheat sheets that should help you explore your Unix-like system:

Not too long ago I wrote a shell script that gives you a brief description of every tool in your PATH:

#!/bin/sh

whatisthere () {
  for dir in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'`; do
    for file in $dir/*; do
      base=`basename $file`
      desc=`whatis $base 2>&1`
      [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo $desc
    done
  done
}

whatisthere | sort | less -SR

Update: The electronic version of The Linux Command Line has been released for free under a creative commons license. Thanks for the tip Norman.

Topics: Unix, Shell

About the Author

Peter J. Jones has been a professional software engineer for over 20 years and is deeply passionate about helping programmers improve the skills of their craft. He is the author of Effective Ruby: 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby. Peter can be reached through our contact page or his twitter account.