<.html> Common Unix Commands The following commands are the most commonly used ones on our system. Some of these commands are specific to the Department of Computer Science at William & Mary and may not be found on other systems. You can click on any of the entries to see the manual page for the selected command. To see a manual page for any command, type "man command" (without the quotes) where command is the name of the command you want information about.

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cat concatenate and display
cd change working directory
chmod change the access permissions of files
clear clear the terminal screen
click enable or disable the keyboard's keystroke click
cp copy files
date display or set the date
find find files by name, or by other characteristics
finger display information about users
grep search a file for a string or regular expression
history display a list of the most recently used commands
kill send a signal to a process, or terminate a process
less browse or page through a text file
logout log out of the system or a shell
lpq display the queue of printer jobs
lpr send a job to the printer
lprm remove jobs from the printer queue
ls list the contents of a directory
mail read or send mail messages
man display reference manual pages
mkdir make a directory
more browse or page through a text file
mv move or rename files
passwd change password information (password, full name, login shell)
ps display the status of current processes
pwd display the pathname of the current working directory
quota display a user's disk quota and usage
rm remove (unlink) files or directories
rmdir remove (unlink) files or directories
spell report spelling errors
talk talk to another user
whoami display the effective current username