Boost Your Productivity: 20 Must‑Know Linux Command‑Line Tricks

As a Linux‑working engineer who uses the command line daily, I often forget useful tricks, so I compiled a handy list.

Format output into a clear table

Use column -t (or specify a delimiter with -s) to turn messy output like mount into a readable table.

Repeat a command until it succeeds

Wrap the command in a while true loop and redirect output to /dev/null to keep trying until it works.

Sort processes by memory usage

Run ps aux | sort -rnk 4 to list processes ordered by memory consumption.

Sort processes by CPU usage

Run ps aux | sort -nk 3 to order by CPU usage.

Check machine architecture

Execute getconf LONG_BIT to see whether the system is 32‑ or 64‑bit.

View multiple log files simultaneously

Install and use multitail (e.g., apt-get install multitail) to monitor several logs with highlighting and filtering.

Return to the previous directory

Simply type cd -.

Make a non‑interactive shell session interactive

Move settings from ~/.bashrc to ~/.bash_profile.

Periodically monitor command output

Use watch (e.g., watch df -h) to refresh any command’s output at regular intervals.

Keep a program running after the session ends

Run it with nohup (e.g., nohup wget site.com/file.zip &) or use screen to detach.

Automatically answer Yes or No

Pipe yes into a command ( yes | apt-get update) or use yes no for automatic “No”.

Create a file of a specific size

Use dd if=/dev/zero of=out.txt bs=1M count=10 to generate a 10 MB zero‑filled file.

Run the last command as root

Type sudo !! to repeat the previous command with sudo.

Record a shell session

Start script to capture everything you type into a file, then exit to finish.

Replace spaces with another delimiter

Use tr to translate characters, e.g., cat geeks.txt | tr ':' '\t' > out.txt.

Convert file contents to upper or lower case

Run cat myfile | tr a-z A-Z > output.txt to change case.

Powerful xargs usage

Combine find with xargs to process many files, or feed a list of URLs to wget. Use -i with placeholders for more complex commands.

These are just a few of the many Linux command‑line tricks you can use to work faster and smarter.