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Rock the Command Line

21 Bash commands to save you time

Jeff Hale
Towards Data Science
10 min readMar 12, 2019

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This article is a gentle introduction to Bash commands. Knowing how to move around the command line is an essential skill to save you time. We’ll hit 21 of the most common commands and their key flags. We’ll also cover Bash shortcuts to save you lots of keystrokes. ⌨️

A shell

Terms

The terms Unix, Linux, Bash, shell, command line, terminal, and shell scripting are distinct things, but they share the commands we’ll discuss. Here’s a quick breakdown of the differences and similarities.

Unix is a popular computer operating system developed by Bell Labs in the 1970s. It wasn’t open source.

Linux is the most popular Unix derivative. It runs a huge number of the computer-like devices in the world.

Your terminal is the emulator program that gives you access to the operating system. You can have multiple terminal windows open simultaneously.

The shell language is used to send commands to the underlying operating system.

Bash stands for Bourne Again SHell. It’s the most common shell language for communicating with the operating system. It’s also the default shell for macOS. To learn more about the open source foundations that support Linux and Bash, check out this article.

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Jeff Hale
Jeff Hale

Written by Jeff Hale

I write about data things. Follow me on Medium and join my Data Awesome mailing list to stay on top of the latest data tools and tips: https://dataawesome.com

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