find - search for files and directories

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Quite often you need to make changes to the files with known names, but unknown location in your system. Sometimes you're simply looking for a file but can only partially remember its name. In these and many other situations, find command is your friend.

Basic find command usage

The easiest form of the find command needs no additional parameters, and you get a full list of files and directories in your current directory:

$ cd /tmp 
$ find
.
./uname.txt
./.X11-unix
./.ICE-unix

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mkdir - create a directory

mkdir is one of the basic Unix commands which allows you to create new directories.

Basic mkdir usage

In its simplest form, it takes one or more directory names as command line parameters.

Creating only one directory:

bash-2.05b$ mkdir /tmp/newdir

Creating a few directories at a time:

bash-2.05b$ mkdir /tmp/newdir2 /tmp/newdir3

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who - find out who is on the system

who is one of basic Unix commands, which allows you to quickly see who else is logged in.

who - default behaviour

When you run who without any parameters, it returns you a list of users on your Unix system, along with terminals they're using, the time of the start for each session, and the hostnames where these users are logged in from.

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uptime - find out how long the Unix system has been up

uptime is one of the basic Unix commands which allows you to quickly confirm how long your Unix system has been up and running since it was last rebooted or powered on.

This is how you use it:

bash-2.05b$ uptime
 11:18:23  up 83 days, 18:29,  4 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.03, 0.01

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uname - print Unix system information

uname is one of the most useful commands when it comes to gathering basic information about your system. You can use it to find out the hostname of the system you're on, the hardware architectures supported by the currently used kernel and the exact release of your system.

Basic uname usage

uname -n

This command shows you the node (host) name of your system:

bash-3.00$ uname -n
samplehost

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ls - list contents of directory

ls command is one of the most commonly used tools in Unix. You simply cannot underestimate the importance of being able to confirm exactly what files and directories are available to you, and ls does its job perfectly.

ls - basic syntax

The most basic way to use this command is to simply make it list files and directories in your current directory. You don't need to specify any parameters for it, just type the command itself:

$ ls

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Basic Unix System Status Commands

I've just updated the Unix system status commands section on the Basic Unix commands page.

Please have a look if you're interested:

Welcome to Unix Commands!

I'm thrilled to present you with Unix Commands - a sister blog of the Unix Tutorial project.

This website will be an easy-to-navigate index of Unix commands you'll need for everyday use.

So far, I've only got the skeleton of the website up, but will be adding more content regularly.

Here are the main index pages (I'm sure you've seen them on the main page of this website):

Initially, each Unix command will get its own separate page like this one: ls command. If any of the pages get too hard for you to scan through, I'll start splitting them into shorter ones.