15 basic Linux commands to get started.

Akshat Srivastava
4 min readJul 13, 2020

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Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

At present every Cyber security Experts and Hackers whether they are White hat or Black hat hackers, they all use UNIX as an Operating System and the most famous kernel according to Cyber security Experts and Hackers is Kali Linux.

What is Kali Linux?

Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. It is maintained and funded by Offensive Security. The man behind Linux is Linus Torvalds.

Kali Linux is very famous among Pentesters and Vulnerability analyst, it is open source software and completely free for any user.

So now without wasting any time, let’s dive into this great topic.

Command №1 mkdir

mkdir is the command which is use to create the directory through terminal.

Example: mkdir [option] [directories]

mkdir test-dir

Command №2 rmdir

rmdir command is used remove empty directories from the filesystem in Linux. The rmdir command removes each and every directory specified in the command line only if these directories are empty. Example: rmdir [option] [directories]

rmdir test-dir

Command №3 ifconfig

The utility is a command-line interface tool and is also used in the system startup scripts of many operating systems.This command is used to give the details of Network settings like IP address, version etc.

Example: simply type ifconfig and hit enter.

Command №4 uname

Displays Linux system information.

Command №5 uname -r

Displays kernel release information.

Command №6 uptime

Displays how long the system has been running including load average.

Command №7 whoami

Displays who you are logged in as.

Command №8 last reboot

Shows system reboot history.

Command №9 iwconfig

It is used to set the parameters of the network interface which are specific to the wireless operation.

Command №10 grep

Grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression.

Command №11 touch

The touch command is a standard command used in UNIX/Linux operating system which is used to create, change and modify timestamps of a file.

Command №12 sudo

The sudo command allows you to run programs with the security privileges of another user (by default, as the superuser). It prompts you for your personal password and confirms your request to execute a command by checking a file, called sudoers , which the system administrator configures.

Command №13 chmod

In Unix-like operating systems, the chmod command is used to change the access mode of a file. The name is an abbreviation of change mode. It is used to change the permissions of the file using 3 digit numbers, each number has it own permission.

To find out the file’s permissions in numeric mode simply calculate the totals for all users classes. For example, to give read, write and execute permission to the file’s owner, read and execute permissions to the file’s group and only read permissions to all other users you would do the following:

  • Owner: rwx=4+2+1=7
  • Group: r-x=4+0+1=5
  • Others: r-x=4+0+0=4

Example: Give the file’s owner read and write permissions and only read permissions to group members and all other users:

$chmod 644 dirname

Below image will help you a lot!! :)

Command №14 chown

The chown command changes user ownership of a file, directory, or link in Linux. Every file is associated with an owning user or group. It is critical to configure file and folder permissions properly.

And last but not the least!

Command №15 cd

cd command is the most used command in terminal it is used to change one directory to other. In other words this command is used to jump from one directory to other directory.

Conclusion

I hope you all have gained a lot of knowledge.With this, we come to an end of our discussion. Although there are many many other commands that we have not discussed in this article, now I leave on you to explore them and implement them according to your own requirement.

Thank you for reading this article and my best wishes are with you.

Happy Hacking :)

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Akshat Srivastava

An Avid Coder | Cybersecurity Enthusiast | Web developer | Geek | Technical Writer