Linux Commands

Linux is effectively is a command based OS.

The system administrator uses the commands to carry out even the most advanced tasks.
The are commands for every task that the administrator may want to achieve. This includes commands
for:
1. File System Managements
2. Disk Subsystem Managements
3. User and Group Managements
4. Basic Computer Security Management.
5. Network installation and Configuration Managements
6. Server Installation and Management
7. Network Security Managements

Commands Review.
• Linux Shells
• Command, Options and Arguments,
• Redirections >, >>, < and pipes

Basic General Commands

cal, history, date, wall, echo, export, bc, expr .

File Management Commands

cat, cut, cp, rm, mkdir, mv, touch,find, grep, wc, sort, less, head,tail, ls, pwd, rmdir, sed, vim.

Linux “Touch” Command

In Linux every single file is associated with timestamps, and every file stores the information of last
access time, last modification time and last change time. So, whenever we create new file, access or
modify an existing file, the timestamps of that file automatically updated.

The touch command is a standard program for Unix/Linux operating systems, that is used to create,
change and modify timestamps of a file. It has the following options.

Touch Command Options

1. -a, change the access time only
2. -c, if the file does not exist, do not create it
3. -d, update the access and modification times
4. -m, change the modification time only
 5. -r, use the access and modification times of file
6. -t, creates a file using a specified time

Touch Command Examples

1. Create an Empty File touch James creates an empty (zero byte) new file
called James.
2. Create Multiple Files touch James Jane
John

3. Change File Access touch -a James sets the current time and date on a file. If
and Modification Time the James file does not exist, it will create
the new empty file with the name.

4. Avoid Creating New File touch -c James create a file called James if it does not
exists.

5. Change File Modification touch -m James it will only updates the last modification
Time times (not the access times) of the file.

6. Explicitly Set the Access touch -c -t 12101730 Sets the access and modification date and
and Modification times expenses time to a file expenses as 17:30 (17:30
# touch -c -t YYDDHHMM p.m.) December 10 of the current year
filename (2012).

# touch -r expenses touch command with -r option, will update

7. Use the time stamp of james the time-stamp of file james with the time-
another File stamp of expenses file. So, both the file
holds the same time stamp.
# touch -t will gives the tecmint file a time stamp of
8. File using a specified 201212101830.55 [Link] p.m. on December 10, 2012.
tecmint
time
touch -t [Link]
tecmint

Note
The most popular Linux commands such as find command and ls command uses timestamps for listing
and finding files.
Next verify the access and modification time of file expenses, with ls -l command.
# ls -l

total 2
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Dec 10 17:30 expenses
WC Command & Options
The wc (word count) command in Unix/Linux operating systems is used to find out number of
newline count, word count, byte and characters count in a files specified by the file arguments. The
syntax of wc command as shown below.
[root@tecmint ~]# wc --help

Usage: wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

or: wc [OPTION]... --files0-from=F
Print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, and a total line if
more than one FILE is specified. With no FILE, or when FILE is -,
read standard input.
-c, --bytes print the byte counts
-m, --chars print the character counts
-l, --lines print the newline counts
-L, --max-line-length print the length of the longest line
-w, --words print the word counts
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
Create a file ‘[Link]‘ for testing the commands with the following content. Use it to practice the
various options of wc command.
Red Hat
CentOS
Fedora
Debian
Scientific Linux
OpenSuse
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Linux Mint
Pearl Linux
Slackware
Mandriva

The History Command & Options

When you are using Linux command line frequently, using the history effectively can be a major
productivity boost.

1. Display timestamp using HISTTIMEFORMAT

Typically when you type history from command line, it displays the command number and the
command. For auditing purpose, it may be beneficial to display the timepstamp along with the
command as shown below.
# export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
# history | more
1 2008-08-05 [Link] service network restart
2 2008-08-05 [Link] exit
3 2008-08-05 [Link] id
4 2008-08-05 [Link] cat /etc/redhat-release
2. Search the history using Control+R
When you’ve already executed a very long command, you can simply search history using a keyword
and re-execute the same command without having to type it fully.
Press Control+R and type the keyword. In the following example, I searched for red, which
displayed the previous command “cat /etc/redhat-release” in the history that contained the word red.
# [Press Ctrl+R from the command prompt,
which will display the reverse-i-search prompt]
(reverse-i-search)`red': cat /etc/redhat-release
[Note: Press enter when you see your command,
which will execute the command from the history]
# cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)

Sometimes you want to edit a command from history before executing it. For e.g. you can search for
httpd, which will display service httpd stop from the command history, select this command and
change the stop to start and re-execute it again as shown below.
# [Press Ctrl+R from the command prompt,
which will display the reverse-i-search prompt]
(reverse-i-search)`httpd': service httpd stop
[Note: Press either left arrow or right arrow key when you see your
command, which will display the command for you to edit, before executing it]
# service httpd start

3. Repeat previous command quickly using 4 different methods

Sometime you may end up repeating the previous commands for various reasons. Following are the 4
different ways to repeat the last executed command.
1. Use the up arrow to view the previous command and press enter to execute it.
2. Type !! and press enter from the command line
3. Type !-1 and press enter from the command line.
4. Press Control+P will display the previous command, press enter to execute it

4. Execute a specific command from history

In the following example, If you want to repeat the command #4, you can do !4 as shown below.
# history | more
1 service network restart
2 exit
3 id
4 cat /etc/redhat-release

# !4
cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)

5. Execute previous command that starts with a specific word

Type ! followed by the starting few letters of the command that you would like to re-execute. In the
following example, typing !ps and enter, executed the previous command starting with ps, which is ‘ps
aux | grep yp’.
# !ps
ps aux | grep yp
root 16947 0.0 0.1 36516 1264 ? Sl 13:10 0:00 ypbind
root 17503 0.0 0.0 4124 740 pts/0 S+ 19:19 0:00 grep yp

6. Control the total number of lines in the history using HISTSIZE

Append the following two lines to the .bash_profile and relogin to the bash shell again to see the
change. In this example, only 450 command will be stored in the bash history.
# vi ~/.bash_profile
HISTSIZE=450
HISTFILESIZE=450

7. Change the history file name using HISTFILE

By default, history is stored in ~/.bash_history file. Add the following line to the .bash_profile and
relogin to the bash shell, to store the history command in .commandline_warrior file instead of
.bash_history file. I’m yet to figure out a practical use for this. I can see this getting used when you
want to track commands executed from different terminals using different history file name.
# vi ~/.bash_profile
HISTFILE=/root/.commandline_warrior

If you have a good reason to change the name of the history file, please share it with me, as I’m
interested in finding out how you are using this feature.

8. Eliminate the continuous repeated entry from history using HISTCONTROL

In the following example pwd was typed three times, when you do history, you can see all the 3
continuous occurrences of it. To eliminate duplicates, set HISTCONTROL to ignoredups as shown
below.
# pwd
# pwd
# pwd
# history | tail -4
44 pwd
45 pwd
46 pwd [Note that there are three pwd commands in history, after
executing pwd 3 times as shown above]
47 history | tail -4

# export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
# pwd
# pwd
# pwd
# history | tail -3
56 export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
57 pwd [Note that there is only one pwd command in the history, even after
executing pwd 3 times as shown above]
58 history | tail -4

9. Erase duplicates across the whole history using HISTCONTROL

The ignoredups shown above removes duplicates only if they are consecutive commands. To eliminate
duplicates across the whole history, set the HISTCONTROL to erasedups as shown below.
# export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
# pwd
# service httpd stop
# history | tail -3
38 pwd
39 service httpd stop
40 history | tail -3

# ls -ltr
# service httpd stop
# history | tail -6
35 export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
36 pwd
37 history | tail -3
38 ls -ltr
39 service httpd stop
[Note that the previous service httpd stop after pwd got erased]
40 history | tail -6

10. Force history not to remember a particular command using HISTCONTROL

When you execute a command, you can instruct history to ignore the command by setting
HISTCONTROL to ignorespace AND typing a space in front of the command as shown below. I can
see lot of junior sysadmins getting excited about this, as they can hide a command from the history. It is
good to understand how ignorespace works. But, as a best practice, don’t hide purposefully anything
from history.
# export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
# ls -ltr
# pwd
# service httpd stop [Note that there is a space at the beginning of service,
to ignore this command from history]
# history | tail -3
67 ls -ltr
68 pwd
69 history | tail -3

11. Clear all the previous history using option -c

Sometime you may want to clear all the previous history, but want to keep the history moving forward.
# history -c

12. Subtitute words from history commands

When you are searching through history, you may want to execute a different command but use the
same parameter from the command that you’ve just searched.
In the example below, the !!:$ next to the vi command gets the argument from the previous command
to the current command.
# ls [Link]
# cat !!:$ ( Same as cat [Link])

In the example below, the !^ next to the vi command gets the first argument from the previous
command (i.e cp command) to the current command (i.e vi command).
# cp [Link] [Link]
# cat !^ ( same as cat [Link])

13. Substitute a specific argument for a specific command.

In the example below, !cp:2 searches for the previous command in history that starts with cp and takes
the second argument of cp and substitutes it for the ls -l command as shown below.
# cp ~/[Link] /really/a/very/long/path/[Link]
# ls -l !cp:2
ls -l /really/a/very/long/path/[Link]

In the example below, !cp:$ searches for the previous command in history that starts with cp and takes
the last argument (in this case, which is also the second argument as shown above) of cp and substitutes
it for the ls -l command as shown below.
# ls -l !cp:$
ls -l /really/a/very/long/path/[Link]

14. Disable the usage of history using HISTSIZE

If you want to disable history all together and don’t want bash shell to remember the commands you’ve
typed, set the HISTSIZE to 0 as shown below.
# export HISTSIZE=0
# history
# [Note that history did not display anything]

15. Ignore specific commands from the history using HISTIGNORE

Sometimes you may not want to clutter your history with basic commands such as pwd and ls. Use
HISTIGNORE to specify all the commands that you want to ignore from the history. Please note that
adding ls to the HISTIGNORE ignores only ls and not ls -l. So, you have to provide the exact
command that you would like to ignore from the history.
# export HISTIGNORE="pwd:ls:ls -ltr:"
# pwd
# ls
# ls -ltr
# service httpd stop
# history | tail -3
79 export HISTIGNORE="pwd:ls:ls -ltr:"
80 service httpd stop
81 history

The LS Command & Options

ls – Unix users and sysadmins cannot live without this two letter command. Whether you use it 10
times a day or 100 times a day, knowing the power of ls command can make your command line
journey enjoyable.
We examine some Examples of the mighty ls command.

1. Open Last Edited File Using ls -t

To open the last edited file in the current directory use the combination of ls, head and vi commands as
shown below.
ls -t sorts the file by modification time, showing the last edited file first. head -1 picks up this first file.
$ vi [Link]
$ vi [Link]

$ vi `ls -t | head -1`

[Note: This will open the last file you edited (i.e [Link])]

2. Display One File Per Line Using ls -1

To show single entry per line, use -1 option as shown below.
$ ls -1
bin
boot
cdrom
dev
etc
home
initrd
[Link]
lib

3. Display All Information About Files/Directories Using ls -l

To show long listing information about the file/directory.
$ ls -l
-rw-r----- 1 ramesh team-dev 9275204 Jun 13 15:27 [Link]

• 1st Character – File Type: First character specifies the type of the file.
In the example above the hyphen (-) in the 1st character indicates that this is a normal file.
Following are the possible file type options in the 1st character of the ls -l output.
• Field Explanation
 • – normal file
• d directory
• s socket file
• l link file
• Field 1 – File Permissions: Next 9 character specifies the files permission. Each 3 characters
refers to the read, write, execute permissions for user, group and world In this example, -rw-r
—– indicates read-write permission for user, read permission for group, and no permission for
others.
• Field 2 – Number of links: Second field specifies the number of links for that file. In this
example, 1 indicates only one link to this file.
• Field 3 – Owner: Third field specifies owner of the file. In this example, this file is owned by
username ‘ramesh’.
• Field 4 – Group: Fourth field specifies the group of the file. In this example, this file belongs to
”team-dev’ group.
• Field 5 – Size: Fifth field specifies the size of file. In this example, ‘9275204’ indicates the file
size.
• Field 6 – Last modified date & time: Sixth field specifies the date and time of the last
modification of the file. In this example, ‘Jun 13 15:27′ specifies the last modification time of
the file.
• Field 7 – File name: The last field is the name of the file. In this example, the file name is
[Link].

4. Display File Size in Human Readable Format Using ls -lh

Use ls -lh (h stands for human readable form), to display file size in easy to read format. i.e M for MB,
K for KB, G for GB.
$ ls -l
-rw-r----- 1 ramesh team-dev 9275204 Jun 12 15:27 [Link]*

$ ls -lh
-rw-r----- 1 ramesh team-dev 8.9M Jun 12 15:27 [Link]

5. Display Directory Information Using ls -ld

When you use “ls -l” you will get the details of directories content. But if you want the details of
directory then you can use -d option as., For example, if you use ls -l /etc will display all the files under
etc directory. But, if you want to display the information about the /etc/ directory, use -ld option as
shown below.
$ ls -l /etc
total 3344
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15276 Oct 5 2004 [Link]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2562 Oct 5 2004 [Link]
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 2 2007 acpi
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 48 Feb 8 2008 adjtime
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 2 2007 alchemist

$ ls -ld /etc
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Jun 15 07:02 /etc
6. Order Files Based on Last Modified Time Using ls -lt
To sort the file names displayed in the order of last modification time use the -t option. You will be
finding it handy to use it in combination with -l option.
$ ls -lt
total 76
drwxrwxrwt 14 root root 4096 Jun 22 07:36 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 121 root root 4096 Jun 22 07:05 etc
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 13780 Jun 22 07:04 dev
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Jun 20 23:12 root
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jun 18 08:31 home
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 17 21:21 sbin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 May 17 20:29 cdrom -> media/cdrom
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 May 17 20:29 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Jul 2 2008 var

7. Order Files Based on Last Modified Time (In Reverse Order) Using ls -ltr
To sort the file names in the last modification time in reverse order. This will be showing the last edited
file in the last line which will be handy when the listing goes beyond a page. This is my default ls
usage. Anytime I do ls, I always use ls -ltr as I find this very convenient.
$ ls -ltr

total 76
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Jul 2 2008 var
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 May 17 20:29 lost+found
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 May 17 20:29 cdrom -> media/cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 17 21:21 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jun 18 08:31 home
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Jun 20 23:12 root
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 13780 Jun 22 07:04 dev
drwxr-xr-x 121 root root 4096 Jun 22 07:05 etc
drwxrwxrwt 14 root root 4096 Jun 22 07:36 tmp

8. Display Hidden Files Using ls -a (or) ls -A

To show all the hidden files in the directory, use ‘-a option’. Hidden files in Unix starts with ‘.’ in its
file name.
$ ls -a
[rnatarajan@asp-dev ~]$ ls -a
. [Link]
.. [Link]
.bash_history [Link]
.bash_logout .lftp
.bash_profile [Link]
.bashrc [Link]

It will show all the files including the ‘.’ (current directory) and ‘..’ (parent directory). To show the
hidden files, but not the ‘.’ (current directory) and ‘..’ (parent directory), use option -A.
$ ls -A
[Link] [Link]
[Link] [Link]
.bash_history [Link]
.bash_logout .lftp
.bash_profile [Link]
.bashrc [Link]
[Note: . and .. are not displayed here]

9. Display Files Recursively Using ls -R

$ ls /etc/sysconfig/networking
devices profiles

$ ls -R /etc/sysconfig/networking
/etc/sysconfig/networking:
devices profiles

/etc/sysconfig/networking/devices:

/etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles:
default

/etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default:

To show all the files recursively, use -R option. When you do this from /, it shows all the unhidden files
in the whole file system recursively.

10. Display File Inode Number Using ls -i

Sometimes you may want to know the inone number of a file for internal maintenance. Use -i option as
shown below to display inone number. Using inode number you can remove files that has special
characters in it’s name as explained in the example#6 of the find command article.
$ ls -i /etc/xinetd.d/
279694 chargen 279724 cups-lpd 279697 daytime-udp
279695 chargen-udp 279696 daytime 279698 echo

11. Hide Control Characters Using ls -q

To print question mark instead of the non graphics control characters use the -q option.
ls -q

12. Display File UID and GID Using ls -n

Lists the output like -l, but shows the uid and gid in numeric format instead of names.
$ ls -l ~/.bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 ramesh ramesh 909 Feb 8 11:48 /home/ramesh/.bash_profile
$ ls -n ~/.bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 511 511 909 Feb 8 11:48 /home/ramesh/.bash_profile

[Note: This display 511 for uid and 511 for gid]
13. Visual Classification of Files With Special Characters Using ls -F
Instead of doing the ‘ls -l’ and then the checking for the first character to determine the type of file. You
can use -F which classifies the file with different special character for different kind of files.
$ ls -F
Desktop/ Documents/ Ubuntu-App@ firstfile Music/ Public/ Templates/

Thus in the above output,

• / – directory.
• nothing – normal file.
• @ – link file.
• * – Executable file

14. Visual Classification of Files With Colors Using ls -F

Recognizing the file type by the color in which it gets displayed is an another kind in classification of
file. In the above output directories get displayed in blue, soft links get displayed in green, and ordinary
files gets displayed in default color.
$ ls --color=auto
Desktop Documents Examples firstfile Music Pictures Public Templates Videos

15. Useful ls Command Aliases

You can take some required ls options in the above, and make it as aliases. We suggest the following.
• Long list the file with size in human understandable form.
alias ll="ls -lh"

• Classify the file type by appending special characters.

alias lv="ls -F"

• Classify the file type by both color and special character.

alias ls="ls -F --color=auto"

16 List Files Based on Last Access Time ls -ltu

Listing of files in directory based on last access time, i.e. based on time the file was last accessed, not
modified.
# ls -ltu

total 3084272
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:24 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Linux-ISO
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Music-Player
drwx------ 3 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 tor-browser_en-US
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 bin
drwxr-xr-x 11 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Android Games
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Songs
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 renamefiles
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 katoolin-master
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Tricks
drwxr-xr-x 3 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 Linux-Tricks
drwxr-xr-x 6 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 tuptime
drwxr-xr-x 4 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 xdm
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 20480 Jan 19 15:22 ffmpeg usage
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:22 xdm-helper

3. List Files Based on Last Modification Time

Listing of files in directory based on last modification time of file’s status information, or the
'ctime'. This command would list that file first whose any status information like: owner, group,
permissions, size etc has been recently changed.
# ls -ltc

total 3084272
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 15:24 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 13:05 img
-rw------- 1 tecmint tecmint 262191 Jan 19 12:15 [Link]
drwxr-xr-x 5 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 19 10:57 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 7 tecmint tecmint 12288 Jan 18 16:00 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 13 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 18 15:36 VirtualBox VMs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tecmint tecmint 691 Jan 13 14:57 [Link]
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint 654325 Jan 4 16:55 [Link]
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint 654329 Jan 4 11:17 [Link]
drwxr-xr-x 3 tecmint tecmint 4096 Jan 4 11:04 powertop-2.7
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint 447795 Dec 31 14:22 [Link]
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint 12 Dec 18 18:46 ravi
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint 1823 Dec 16 12:45 [Link]
...

If '-a' switch is used with above commands, they can list and sort even the hidden files in current
directory, and '-r' switch lists the output in reverse order.
The cat command & Options
cat stands for Concatenate. Cat is the basic command when we start learning Linux/Unix, as the name
suggest it is used to create new file ,concatenate files and display the output of files on the standard
output.

Example:1 Create a new file using ‘cat > {file_name}’

Let’s suppose i want to create a new file with name ‘linux_world’. Type the following cat command
followed by the text you want in to insert in the file. Make sure you type ‘Ctrl-d’ at the end to save
the file.

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat > linux_world

Hi this is my first file in linux.

Linux always rocks
Thanks
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Example:2 View the Contents of a File.

To display or view the contents of a file using cat command use the below syntax
# cat {file_name}
Let’s display the contents of linux_world file.
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat linux_world

Example:3 View the Contents of Multiple Files

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat linux_world linux_distributions /etc/fstab

Above command will display output of three files on the terminal.

Example:4 Display the output of a file using page wise.

For example if we have a big file whose contents can’t be display at once on the screen , in that case we
can use more and less command with cat to view the contents page wise.
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat /etc/passwd | more
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat /etc/passwd | less

Example:Using cat command without filename arguments

if we don’t specify any arguments in the cat command then it will read the inputs from the keyboard
attached to the system. Type some text after entering the cat command.
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat
Ubuntu Linux Rocks at desktop Level

Now press ‘Ctrl-d‘ to inform cat that it has reached end of file (EOF). In this case it will display the
line of text twice because it copies std input to std output.
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat
Ubuntu Linux Rocks at desktop Level
Ubuntu Linux Rocks at desktop Level
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Example:6 Display the contents of a file with Line Numbers

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat -n linux_world
1 Hi this is my first file in linux.
2 Linux always rocks
3 Thanks
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

In case if your file has blank lines , then above command will also display the number of blank lines as
well, so to remove the numbering of blank lines , we can use ‘-b‘ option in place of ‘-n’ in the above
command.

Example:Copy the contents of One file to Another file.

Using greater than ‘>‘ symbol in cat command we can copy the contents of one file to another ,
example is shown below :
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat linux_world > linux_text
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Example:8Appending the contents of one file to another.

Using double greater than symbol ‘>>‘ in cat command we can append the contents of one file to
another. Example is shown below :
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat /etc/passwd >> linux_text
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Above Command will append the contents of /etc/passwd file to linux_text file at the end. Now we can
verify the contents of linux_text file.

Example:Redirecting the output of multiple files into a Single File.

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat linux_world linux_distributions /etc/fstab >
linux_merge_text

Above command will merge the output of 3 files into a single file ‘linux_merge_text’.

Example:Getting input using standard input operator.

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat < [Link]
CentOS
Fedora
Ubuntu
SuSE
Linux Mint
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Above cat command is getting input from the file using std input operator ‘<‘

Example:Sorting the output of multiple files into a single file

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat linux_text linux_distributions /etc/passwd | sort >
linux_sort

By default sorting will done on the alphabetic order, if you want the sorting on basis of number then
use ‘-n’ option in the sort command.

Example: Insert $ at end of each line using -E option

[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat -E linux_world
Hi this is my first file in linux.$
Linux always rocks$
Thanks$
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Above command will insert ‘$’ at the end of each line in the output.

Example:Show the tab space in the file as ‘^I’ using -T option.

Let’s create a file with some tab spaces.

Now display these tab spaces as ^I

Example:Squeeze blank repeated lines using -s option

Let’s take am example of file ‘linux_blank’ , which consists of multiple repeated blank lines.

Now remove the blank repeated lines in the output using below command.
[root@linuxtechi ~]# cat -s linux_blank
test

test1
test2

test3

test4
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Example:View the Contents in Reverse Order ( using the tac command)

tac is the reverse of cat command. tac will display the output in revers order example is shown below
[root@linuxtechi ~]# tac linux_world
Thanks
Linux always rocks
Hi this is my first file in linux.
[root@linuxtechi ~]#

Example:Display non-printing characters using -v option.

-v option in the cat command is used to show the non-printing characters in the output. This option
become useful when we are suspecting the CRLF ending lines, in that case it will show ^M at the end
of each line.
[root@linuxtechi tmp]# cat test_file
hi there

[root@linuxtechi tmp]# cat -v test_file

hi there^M
[root@linuxtechi tmp]#

The find Command & Options

The find command is one of the most essential commands on the linux terminal, that enables searching
of files very easy. Its a must of all system administrators.
We have divided the section into Five parts from basic to advance usage of find command.
1. Basic Find Commands for Finding Files with Names
2. Find Files Based on their Permissions
3. Search Files Based On Owners and Groups
4. Find Files and Directories Based on Date and Time
5. Find Files and Directories Based on Size

Basic Find Commands for Finding Files with Names

1. Find Files Using Name in Current Directory
Find all the files whose name is [Link] in a current working directory.
# find . -name [Link]

./[Link]

2. Find Files Under Home Directory

Find all the files under /home directory with name [Link].
# find /home -name [Link]

/home/[Link]

3. Find Files Using Name and Ignoring Case

Find all the files whose name is [Link] and contains both capital and small letters in /home
directory.
# find /home -iname [Link]

./[Link]
./[Link]

4. Find Directories Using Name

Find all directories whose name is Tecmint in / directory.
# find / -type d -name Tecmint

/Tecmint

5. Find PHP Files Using Name

Find all php files whose name is [Link] in a current working directory.
# find . -type f -name [Link]

./[Link]

6. Find all PHP Files in Directory

Find all php files in a directory.
# find . -type f -name "*.php"

./[Link]
./[Link]
./[Link]
Find Files Based on their Permissions

7. Find Files With 777 Permissions

Find all the files whose permissions are 777.
# find . -type f -perm 0777 -print

8. Find Files Without 777 Permissions

Find all the files without permission 777.
# find / -type f ! -perm 777

9. Find SGID Files with 644 Permissions

Find all the SGID bit files whose permissions set to 644.
# find / -perm 2644

10. Find Sticky Bit Files with 551 Permissions

Find all the Sticky Bit set files whose permission are 551.
# find / -perm 1551

11. Find SUID Files

Find all SUID set files.
# find / -perm /u=s

12. Find SGID Files

Find all SGID set files.
# find / -perm /g+s

13. Find Read Only Files

Find all Read Only files.
# find / -perm /u=r

14. Find Executable Files

Find all Executable files.
# find / -perm /a=x
15. Find Files with 777 Permissions and Chmod to 644
Find all 777 permission files and use chmod command to set permissions to 644.
# find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

16. Find Directories with 777 Permissions and Chmod to 755

Find all 777 permission directories and use chmod command to set permissions to 755.
# find / -type d -perm 777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

17. Find and remove single File

To find a single file called [Link] and remove it.
# find . -type f -name "[Link]" -exec rm -f {} \;

18. Find and remove Multiple File

To find and remove multiple files such as .mp3 or .txt, then use.
# find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

OR

# find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec rm -f {} \;

19. Find all Empty Files

To file all empty files under certain path.
# find /tmp -type f -empty

20. Find all Empty Directories

To file all empty directories under certain path.
# find /tmp -type d -empty

21. File all Hidden Files

To find all hidden files, use below command.
# find /tmp -type f -name ".*"
 Search Files Based On Owners and Groups

22. Find Single File Based on User

To find all or single file called [Link] under / root directory of owner root.
# find / -user root -name [Link]

23. Find all Files Based on User

To find all files that belongs to user Tecmint under /home directory.
# find /home -user tecmint

24. Find all Files Based on Group

To find all files that belongs to group Developer under /home directory.
# find /home -group developer

25. Find Particular Files of User

To find all .txt files of user Tecmint under /home directory.
# find /home -user tecmint -iname "*.txt"

Find Files and Directories Based on Date and Time

26. Find Last 50 Days Modified Files

To find all the files which are modified 50 days back.
# find / -mtime 50

27. Find Last 50 Days Accessed Files

To find all the files which are accessed 50 days back.
# find / -atime 50

28. Find Last 50-100 Days Modified Files

To find all the files which are modified more than 50 days back and less than 100 days.
# find / -mtime +50 –mtime -100

29. Find Changed Files in Last 1 Hour

To find all the files which are changed in last 1 hour.
# find / -cmin -60
30. Find Modified Files in Last 1 Hour
To find all the files which are modified in last 1 hour.
# find / -mmin -60

31. Find Accessed Files in Last 1 Hour

To find all the files which are accessed in last 1 hour.
# find / -amin -60

Find Files and Directories Based on Size

32. Find 50MB Files

To find all 50MB files, use.
# find / -size 50M

33. Find Size between 50MB – 100MB

To find all the files which are greater than 50MB and less than 100MB.
# find / -size +50M -size -100M

34. Find and Delete 100MB Files

To find all 100MB files and delete them using one single command.
# find / -size +100M -exec rm -rf {} \;

35. Find Specific Files and Delete

Find all .mp3 files with more than 10MB and delete them using one single command.
# find / -type f -name *.mp3 -size +10M -exec rm {} \;

Below commands show usage of sort with find command to sort the list of files based on Date and
Time.

36. Sorting Files based on Month

Here, we use find command to find all files in root (‘/’) directory and then print the result as:
Month in which file was accessed and then filename. Of that complete result, here we list out top 11
entries.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%Ab %p" | head -n 11
Dec /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install
Dec /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
Dec /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]

The below command sorts the output using key as first field, specified by '-k1' and then it sorts on
Month as specified by 'M' ahead of it.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%Ab %p" | head -n 11 | sort -k1M

Apr /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
Apr /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
Nov /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]
Dec /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0
Dec /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
Dec /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install

36. Sort Files Based on Date

Here, again we use find command to find all the files in root directory, but now we will print the
result as: last date the file was accessed, last time the file was accessed and then filename. Of that we
take out top 11 entries.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%AD %AT %p" | head -n 11

12/08/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install

12/07/15 [Link].2694776230 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0
04/11/15 [Link].9819910430 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
04/11/15 [Link].9939910430 /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
04/11/15 [Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
04/11/15 [Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
12/18/15 [Link].2656728990 /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]

The below sort command first sorts on basis of last digit of the year, then sorts on basis of last digit of
month in reverse order and finally sorts on basis of first field. Here, ‘1.8‘ means 8th column of first
field and ‘n’ ahead of it means numerical sort, while ‘r’ indicates reverse order sorting.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%AD %AT %p" | head -n 11 | sort -k1.8n -k1.1nr -k1

12/07/15 [Link].2694776230 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0

12/08/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install
12/18/15 [Link].2656728990 /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
11/12/15 [Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]
04/11/15 [Link].9819910430 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
04/11/15 [Link].9939910430 /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
04/11/15 [Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
04/11/15 [Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0

37. Sorting Files Based on Time

Here, again we use find command to list out top 11 files in root directory and print the result in
format: last time file was accessed and then filename.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%AT %p" | head -n 11

[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install
[Link].2694776230 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0
[Link].9819910430 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
[Link].9939910430 /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
[Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
[Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
[Link].2656728990 /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]

The below command sorts the output based on first column of the first field of the output which is first
digit of hour.
# find / -type f -printf "\n%AT %p" | head -n 11 | sort -k1.1n

[Link].9819910430 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
[Link].9939910430 /usr/lib/[Link].5.1.2
[Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.15
[Link].0099910420 /usr/lib/[Link].1.0.0
[Link].2694776230 /usr/lib/[Link].0.0.0
[Link].2656728990 /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf32_x86_64.xr
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/elf_i386.xbn
[Link].0000000000 /usr/lib/ldscripts/[Link]

38. Sorting Ouptut of ls -l based on Date

This command sorts the output of 'ls -l' command based on 6th field month wise, then based on
7th field which is date, numerically.
# ls -l | sort -k6M -k7n

total 116
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 1 19:51 [Link]
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 7 15:27 Desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15853 Oct 7 15:19 powertop_report.csv
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 79112 Oct 7 15:25 [Link]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 16 15:26 file3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13 Oct 16 15:17 B
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Oct 16 15:16 A
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64 Oct 16 15:38 C

Some advanced operations

The find command not only finds files based on a certain criteria, it can also act upon those files using
any linux command. For example, we might want to delete some files.
Here are some quick examples

39. List out the found files

Lets say we found files using find command, and now want to list them out as the ls command would
have done. This is very easy.
$ find . -exec ls -ld {} \;

drwxrwxr-x 4 enlightened enlightened 4096 Aug 11 19:01 .

-rw-rw-r-- 1 enlightened enlightened 0 Aug 11 16:25 ./[Link]
drwxrwxr-x 2 enlightened enlightened 4096 Aug 11 16:48 ./abc
drwxrwxr-x 2 enlightened enlightened 4096 Aug 11 16:26 ./subdir
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enlightened enlightened 0 Aug 11 16:26 ./subdir/[Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enlightened enlightened 29 Aug 11 19:13 ./[Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enlightened enlightened 0 Aug 11 16:25 ./[Link]

40 Delete all matching files or directories

The following command will remove all text files in the tmp directory.
$ find /tmp -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

The same operating can be carried out with directories, just put type d, instead of type f.
Lets take another example where we want to delete files larger than 100MB
$ find /home/bob/dir -type f -name *.log -size +10M -exec rm -f {} \;

The Cut Command & Options

Linux command cut is used for text processing. You can use this command to extract portion of text
from a file by selecting columns.
Below are some practical examples of cut command.
For most of the example, we’ll be using the following test file.
$ cat [Link]
cat command for file oriented operations.
cp command for copy files or directories.
ls command to list out files and directories with its attributes.
1. Select Column of Characters
To extract only a desired column from a file use -c option. The following example displays 2nd
character from each line of a file [Link]
$ cut -c2 [Link]
a
p
s

As seen above, the characters a, p, s are the second character from each line of the [Link] file.

2. Select Column of Characters using Range

Range of characters can also be extracted from a file by specifying start and end position delimited
with -. The following example extracts first 3 characters of each line from a file called [Link]. The first
character index is 1.
$ cut -c1-3 [Link]
cat
cp
ls

3. Select Column of Characters using either Start or End Position

Either start position or end position can be passed to cut command with -c option.
The following specifies only the start position before the ‘-‘. This example extracts from 3rd character
to end of each line from [Link] file.
$ cut -c3- [Link]
t command for file oriented operations.
command for copy files or directories.
command to list out files and directories with its attributes.

The following specifies only the end position after the ‘-‘. This example extracts 8 characters from the
beginning of each line from [Link] file.
$ cut -c-8 [Link]
cat comm
cp comma
ls comma

The entire line would get printed when you don’t specify a number before or after the ‘-‘ as shown
below.
$ cut -c- [Link]
cat command for file oriented operations.
cp command for copy files or directories.
ls command to list out files and directories with its attributes.

4. Select a Specific Field from a File

Instead of selecting x number of characters, if you like to extract a whole field, you can combine option
-f and -d. The option -f specifies which field you want to extract, and the option -d specifies what is the
field delimiter that is used in the input file.
The following example displays only first field of each lines from /etc/passwd file using the field
delimiter : (colon). In this case, the 1st field is the username. The file
$ cut -d':' -f1 /etc/passwd
root
daemon
bin
sys
sync
games
bala

5. Select Multiple Fields from a File

You can also extract more than one fields from a file or stdout. Below example displays username and
home directory of users who has the login shell as “/bin/bash”.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1,6
root:/root
bala:/home/bala

To display the range of fields specify start field and end field as shown below. In this example, we are
selecting field 1 through 4, 6 and 7
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1-4,6,7
root:x:0:0:/root:/bin/bash
bala:x:1000:1000:/home/bala:/bin/bash

6. Select Fields Only When a Line Contains the Delimiter

In our /etc/passwd example, if you pass a different delimiter other than : (colon), cut will just display
the whole line.
In the following example, we’ve specified the delimiter as | (pipe), and cut command simply displays
the whole line, even when it doesn’t find any line that has | (pipe) as delimiter.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d'|' -f1
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
bala:x:1000:1000:bala,,,:/home/bala:/bin/bash

But, it is possible to filter and display only the lines that contains the specified delimiter using -s
option.
The following example doesn’t display any output, as the cut command didn’t find any lines that has |
(pipe) as delimiter in the /etc/passwd file.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d'|' -s -f1

7. Select All Fields Except the Specified Fields

In order to complement the selection field list use option –complement.
The following example displays all the fields from /etc/passwd file except field 7
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' --complement -s -f7
root:x:0:0:root:/root
bala:x:1000:1000:bala,,,:/home/bala

8. Change Output Delimiter for Display

By default the output delimiter is same as input delimiter that we specify in the cut -d option.
To change the output delimiter use the option –output-delimiter as shown below. In this example, the
input delimiter is : (colon), but the output delimiter is # (hash).
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -s -f1,6,7 --output-delimiter='#'
root#/root#/bin/bash
bala#/home/bala#/bin/bash

9. Change Output Delimiter to Newline

In this example, each and every field of the cut command output is displayed in a separate line. We still
used –output-delimiter, but the value is $’\n’ which indicates that we should add a newline as the output
delimiter.
$ grep bala /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1,6,7 --output-delimiter=$'\n'
bala
/home/bala
/bin/bash

Once you master the basic usage of cut command as explained above, you can wisely use cut command
to solve lot of your text manipulation requirements.

The TR Command Examples

tr is an UNIX utility for translating, or deleting, or squeezing repeated characters. It will read from
STDIN and write to STDOUT.
tr stands for translate.

Syntax
The syntax of tr command is:
$ tr [OPTION] SET1 [SET2]

-c, -C, --complement use the complement of SET1

-d, --delete delete characters in SET1, do not translate
-s, --squeeze-repeats replace each input sequence of a repeated character
that is listed in SET1 with a single occurrence of that
character
-t, --truncate-set1 first truncate SET1 to length of SET2
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
SETs are specified as strings of characters. Most represent themselves.
Interpreted sequences are:

\NNN character with octal value NNN (1 to 3 octal digits)

\\ backslash
\a audible BEL
\b backspace
\f form feed
\n new line
\r return
\t horizontal tab
\v vertical tab
CHAR1-CHAR2 all characters from CHAR1 to CHAR2 in ascending order
[CHAR*] in SET2, copies of CHAR until length of SET1
[CHAR*REPEAT] REPEAT copies of CHAR, REPEAT octal if starting with 0
[:alnum:] all letters and digits
[:alpha:] all letters
[:blank:] all horizontal whitespace
[:cntrl:] all control characters
[:digit:] all digits
[:graph:] all printable characters, not including space
[:lower:] all lower case letters
[:print:] all printable characters, including space
[:punct:] all punctuation characters
[:space:] all horizontal or vertical whitespace
[:upper:] all upper case letters
[:xdigit:] all hexadecimal digits
[=CHAR=] all characters which are equivalent to CHAR

Translation
If both the SET1 and SET2 are specified and ‘-d’ OPTION is not specified, then tr command will
replace each characters in SET1 with each character in same position in SET2.

1. Convert lower case to upper case

The following tr command is used to convert the lower case to upper case
$ tr abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
thegeekstuff
THEGEEKSTUFF

The following command will also convert lower case to upper case
$ tr [:lower:] [:upper:]
thegeekstuff
THEGEEKSTUFF

You can also use ranges in tr. The following command uses ranges to convert lower to upper case.
$ tr a-z A-Z
thegeekstuff
THEGEEKSTUFF

2. Translate braces into parenthesis

You can also translate from and to a file. In this example we will translate braces in a file with
parenthesis.
$ tr '{}' '()' < inputfile > outputfile
The above command will read each character from “inputfile”, translate if it is a brace, and write the
output in “outputfile”.

3. Translate white-space to tabs

The following command will translate all the white-space to tabs
$ echo "This is for testing" | tr [:space:] '\t'
This is for testing

4. Squeeze repetition of characters using -s

In Example 3, we see how to translate space with tabs. But if there are two are more spaces present
continuously, then the previous command will translate each spaces to a tab as follows.
$ echo "This is for testing" | tr [:space:] '\t'
This is for testing

We can use -s option to squeeze the repetition of characters.

$ echo "This is for testing" | tr -s [:space:] '\t'
This is for testing

Similarly you can convert multiple continuous spaces with a single space
$ echo "This is for testing" | tr -s [:space:] ' '
This is for testing

5. Delete specified characters using -d option

tr can also be used to remove particular characters using -d option. From the file [Link]
cat <[Link] | tr -d 't'
To remove all the digits from the string, use
$ echo "my username is 432234" | tr -d [:digit:]
my username is

6. Complement the sets using -c option

You can complement the SET1 using -c option. For example, to remove all characters except digits,
you can use the following.
$ echo "my username is 432234" | tr -cd [:digit:]
432234
7. Remove all non-printable character from a file
The following command can be used to remove all non-printable characters from a file.
$ tr -cd [:print:] < [Link]

8. Join all the lines in a file into a single line

The below command will translate all newlines into spaces and make the result as a single line.
$ tr -s '\n' ' ' < [Link]

The Grep Command Examples

First create the following demo_file that will be used in the examples below to demonstrate grep
command.
$ cat demo_file
THIS LINE IS THE 1ST UPPER CASE LINE IN THIS FILE.
this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
This Line Has All Its First Character Of The Word With Upper Case.

Two lines above this line is empty.

And this is the last line.

1. Search for the given string in a single file

The basic usage of grep command is to search for a specific string in the specified file as shown below.
Syntax:
grep "literal_string" filename
$ grep "this" demo_file
this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
Two lines above this line is empty.
And this is the last line.

2. Checking for the given string in multiple files.

Syntax:
grep "string" FILE_PATTERN

This is also a basic usage of grep command. For this example, let us copy the demo_file to demo_file1.
The grep output will also include the file name in front of the line that matched the specific pattern as
shown below. When the Linux shell sees the meta character, it does the expansion and gives all the files
as input to grep.
$ cp demo_file demo_file1

$ grep "this" demo_*

demo_file:this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
demo_file:Two lines above this line is empty.
demo_file:And this is the last line.
demo_file1:this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
demo_file1:Two lines above this line is empty.
demo_file1:And this is the last line.

3. Case insensitive search using grep -i

Syntax:
grep -i "string" FILE

This is also a basic usage of the grep. This searches for the given string/pattern case insensitively. So it
matches all the words such as “the”, “THE” and “The” case insensitively as shown below.
$ grep -i "the" demo_file

THIS LINE IS THE 1ST UPPER CASE LINE IN THIS FILE.

this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
This Line Has All Its First Character Of The Word With Upper Case.
And this is the last line.

4. Match regular expression in files

Syntax:
grep "REGEX" filename

This is a very powerful feature, if you can use use regular expression effectively. In the following
example, it searches for all the pattern that starts with “lines” and ends with “empty” with anything in-
between. i.e To search “lines[anything in-between]empty” in the demo_file.
$ grep "lines.*empty" demo_file

Two lines above this line is empty.

From documentation of grep: A regular expression may be followed by one of several repetition
operators:
• ? The preceding item is optional and matched at most once.
• * The preceding item will be matched zero or more times.
• + The preceding item will be matched one or more times.
• {n} The preceding item is matched exactly n times.
• {n,} The preceding item is matched n or more times.
• {,m} The preceding item is matched at most m times.
• {n,m} The preceding item is matched at least n times, but not more than m times.

5. Checking for full words, not for sub-strings using grep -w

If you want to search for a word, and to avoid it to match the substrings use -w option. Just doing out a
normal search will show out all the lines.

The following example is the regular grep where it is searching for “is”. When you search for “is”,
without any option it will show out “is”, “his”, “this” and everything which has the substring “is”.
$ grep -i "is" demo_file

THIS LINE IS THE 1ST UPPER CASE LINE IN THIS FILE.

this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
This Line Has All Its First Character Of The Word With Upper Case.
Two lines above this line is empty.
And this is the last line.

The following example is the WORD grep where it is searching only for the word “is”. Please note that
this output does not contain the line “This Line Has All Its First Character Of The Word With Upper
Case”, even though “is” is there in the “This”, as the following is looking only for the word “is” and
not for “this”.
$ grep -iw "is" demo_file

THIS LINE IS THE 1ST UPPER CASE LINE IN THIS FILE.

this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.
Two lines above this line is empty.
And this is the last line.

6. Displaying lines before/after/around the match using grep -A, -B and -C

When doing a grep on a huge file, it may be useful to see some lines after the match. You might feel
handy if grep can show you not only the matching lines but also the lines after/before/around the
match.

Please create the following demo_text file for this example.

$ cat demo_text

4. Vim Word Navigation

You may want to do several navigation in relation to the words, such as:

* e - go to the end of the current word.

* E - go to the end of the current WORD.
* b - go to the previous (before) word.
* B - go to the previous (before) WORD.
* w - go to the next word.
* W - go to the next WORD.

WORD - WORD consists of a sequence of non-blank characters, separated with white

space.
word - word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores.

Example to show the difference between WORD and word

* [Link] - single WORD

* [Link] - seven words.
[Link] N lines after match
-A is the option which prints the specified N lines after the match as shown below.
Syntax:
grep -A <N> "string" FILENAME

The following example prints the matched line, along with the 3 lines after it.
$ grep -A 3 -i "example" demo_text

Example to show the difference between WORD and word

* [Link] - single WORD

* [Link] - seven words.

8 Display N lines before match

-B is the option which prints the specified N lines before the match.
Syntax:
grep -B <N> "string" FILENAME

When you had option to show the N lines after match, you have the -B option for the opposite.
$ grep -B 2 "single WORD" demo_text
Example to show the difference between WORD and word

* [Link] - single WORD

9 Display N lines around match

-C is the option which prints the specified N lines before the match. In some occasion you might want
the match to be appeared with the lines from both the side. This options shows N lines in both the
side(before & after) of match.
$ grep -C 2 "Example" demo_text

word - word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores.

Example to show the difference between WORD and word

* [Link] - single WORD

10 Highlighting the search using GREP_OPTIONS

As grep prints out lines from the file by the pattern / string you had given, if you wanted it to highlight
which part matches the line, then you need to follow the following way.

When you do the following export you will get the highlighting of the matched searches. In the
following example, it will highlight all the this when you set the GREP_OPTIONS environment
variable as shown below.
$ export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto' GREP_COLOR='100;8'

$ grep this demo_file

this line is the 1st lower case line in this file.

Two lines above this line is empty.
And this is the last line.

11. Searching in all files recursively using grep -r

When you want to search in all the files under the current directory and its sub directory. -r option is the
one which you need to use. The following example will look for the string “ramesh” in all the files in
the current directory and all it’s subdirectory.
$ grep -r "ramesh" *

12. Invert match using grep -v

You had different options to show the lines matched, to show the lines before match, and to show the
lines after match, and to highlight match. So definitely You’d also want the option -v to do invert
match.

When you want to display the lines which does not matches the given string/pattern, use the option -v
as shown below. This example will display all the lines that did not match the word “go”.
$ grep -v "go" demo_text
4. Vim Word Navigation

You may want to do several navigation in relation to the words, such as:

WORD - WORD consists of a sequence of non-blank characters, separated with white

space.
word - word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores.

Example to show the difference between WORD and word

* [Link] - single WORD

* [Link] - seven words.

13. display the lines which does not matches all the given pattern.
Syntax:
grep -v -e "pattern" -e "pattern"
$ cat [Link]
a
b
c
d

$ grep -v -e "a" -e "b" -e "c" [Link]

d
14. Counting the number of matches using grep -c
When you want to count that how many lines matches the given pattern/string, then use the option -c.
Syntax:
grep -c "pattern" filename

$ grep -c "go" demo_text

6

When you want do find out how many lines matches the pattern
$ grep -c this demo_file
3

When you want do find out how many lines that does not match the pattern
$ grep -v -c this demo_file
4

15. Display only the file names which matches the given pattern using grep -l
If you want the grep to show out only the file names which matched the given pattern, use the -l
(lower-case L) option.

When you give multiple files to the grep as input, it displays the names of file which contains the text
that matches the pattern, will be very handy when you try to find some notes in your whole directory
structure.
$ grep -l this demo_*
demo_file
demo_file1

16. Show only the matched string

By default grep will show the line which matches the given pattern/string, but if you want the grep to
show out only the matched string of the pattern then use the -o option.

It might not be that much useful when you give the string straight forward. But it becomes very useful
when you give a regex pattern and trying to see what it matches as
$ grep -o "is.*line" demo_file
is line is the 1st lower case line
is line
is is the last line

17. Show the position of match in the line

When you want grep to show the position where it matches the pattern in the file, use the following
options as
Syntax:
grep -o -b "pattern" file

$ cat [Link]
12345
12345

$ grep -o -b "3" [Link]

2:3
8:3

Note: The output of the grep command above is not the position in the line, it is byte offset of the
whole file.

18. Show line number while displaying the output using grep -n
To show the line number of file with the line matched. It does 1-based line numbering for each file. Use
-n option to utilize this feature.
$ grep -n "go" demo_text
5: * e - go to the end of the current word.
6: * E - go to the end of the current WORD.
7: * b - go to the previous (before) word.
8: * B - go to the previous (before) WORD.
9: * w - go to the next word.
10: * W - go to the next WORD.

Grep OR, Grep AND, Grep NOT Operator

Question: Can you explain how to use OR, AND and NOT operators in Unix grep command with
some examples?
Answer: In grep, we have options equivalent to OR and NOT operators. There is no grep AND
opearator. But, you can simulate AND using patterns. The examples mentioned below will help you to
understand how to use OR, AND and NOT in Linux grep command.

The following [Link] file is used in the following examples.

$ cat [Link]
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
400 Nisha Manager Marketing $9,500
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

You already knew that grep is extremely powerful based on these grep command examples.

Grep OR Operator
Use any one of the following 4 methods for grep OR. I prefer method number 3 mentioned below for
grep OR operator.
19 Grep OR Using \|
If you use the grep command without any option, you need to use \| to separate multiple patterns for the
or condition.
grep 'pattern1\|pattern2' filename

For example, grep either Tech or Sales from the [Link] file. Without the back slash in front of the
pipe, the following will not work.
$ grep 'Tech\|Sales' [Link]
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

20 Grep OR Using -E
grep -E option is for extended regexp. If you use the grep command with -E option, you just need to
use | to separate multiple patterns for the or condition.
grep -E 'pattern1|pattern2' filename

For example, grep either Tech or Sales from the [Link] file. Just use the | to separate multiple OR
patterns.
$ grep -E 'Tech|Sales' [Link]
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

21 Grep OR Using egrep

egrep is exactly same as ‘grep -E’. So, use egrep (without any option) and separate multiple patterns for
the or condition.
egrep 'pattern1|pattern2' filename

For example, grep either Tech or Sales from the [Link] file. Just use the | to separate multiple OR
patterns.
$ egrep 'Tech|Sales' [Link]
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

22 Grep OR Using grep -e

Using grep -e option you can pass only one parameter. Use multiple -e option in a single command to
use multiple patterns for the or condition.
grep -e pattern1 -e pattern2 filename
For example, grep either Tech or Sales from the [Link] file. Use multiple -e option with grep for
the multiple OR patterns.
$ grep -e Tech -e Sales [Link]
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

Grep AND
23 Grep AND using -E ‘pattern1.*pattern2′
There is no AND operator in grep. But, you can simulate AND using grep -E option.
grep -E 'pattern1.*pattern2' filename
grep -E 'pattern1.*pattern2|pattern2.*pattern1' filename

The following example will grep all the lines that contain both “Dev” and “Tech” in it (in the same
order).
$ grep -E 'Dev.*Tech' [Link]
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500

The following example will grep all the lines that contain both “Manager” and “Sales” in it (in any
order).
$ grep -E 'Manager.*Sales|Sales.*Manager' [Link]

Note: Using regular expressions in grep is very powerful if you know how to use it effectively.

24 Grep AND using Multiple grep command

You can also use multiple grep command separated by pipe to simulate AND scenario.
grep -E 'pattern1' filename | grep -E 'pattern2'

The following example will grep all the lines that contain both “Manager” and “Sales” in the same line.
$ grep Manager [Link] | grep Sales
100 Thomas Manager Sales $5,000
500 Randy Manager Sales $6,000

Grep NOT
26. Grep NOT using grep -v
Using grep -v you can simulate the NOT conditions. -v option is for invert match. i.e It matches all the
lines except the given pattern.
grep -v 'pattern1' filename
For example, display all the lines except those that contains the keyword “Sales”.
$ grep -v Sales [Link]
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
300 Raj Sysadmin Technology $7,000
400 Nisha Manager Marketing $9,500

You can also combine NOT with other operator to get some powerful combinations.
For example, the following will display either Manager or Developer (bot ignore Sales).
$ egrep 'Manager|Developer' [Link] | grep -v Sales
200 Jason Developer Technology $5,500
400 Nisha Manager Marketing $9,500

The Date Command & Options

Date command is helpful to display date in several formats. It also allows you to set systems date and
time.
We examine few examples on how to use date command with practical examples.

When you execute date command without any option, it will display the current date and time as shown
below.
$ date
Mon May 20 [Link] PDT 2013

1. Display Date from a String Value using –date Option

If you have a static date or time value in a string, you can use -d or –date option to convert the input
string into date format as shown below.
Please note that this doesn’t use the current date and time value. Instead is uses the date and time value
that you pass as string.
The following examples takes an input date only string, and displays the output in date format. If you
don’t specify time, it uses [Link] for time.
$ date --date="12/2/2014"
Tue Dec 2 [Link] PST 2014

$ date --date="2 Feb 2014"

Sun Feb 2 [Link] PST 2014

$ date --date="Feb 2 2014"

Sun Feb 2 [Link] PST 2014

The following example takes an input date and time string, and displays the output in date format.
$ date --date="Feb 2 2014 [Link]"
Sun Feb 2 [Link] PST 2014
2. Read Date Patterns from a file using –file option
This is similar to the -d or –date option that we discussed above. But, you can do it for multiple date
strings. If you have a file that contains various static date strings, you can use -f or –file option as
shown below.
In this example, we can see that datefile contained 2 date strings. Each line of datefile is parsed by date
command and date is outputted for each line.
$ cat datefile
Sept 9 1986
Aug 23 1987

$ date --file=datefile
Tue Sep 9 [Link] EAT 1986
Sun Aug 23 [Link] EAT 1987

3. Get Relative Date Using –date option

You can also use date command to get a future date using relative values.
For example, the following examples gets date of next Monday.
$ date --date="next mon"
Mon Feb 1 [Link] EAT 2016

If string=@is given to date command, then date command convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-
01 UTC) to a date.
It displays date in which 5 seconds are elapsed since epoch 1970-01-01 UTC:
$ date --date=@5
Thu Jan 1 [Link] EAT 1970

It displays date in which 10 seconds are elapsed since epoch 1970-01-01 UTC:
$ date --date=@10
Thu Jan 1 [Link] EAT 1970

It displays date in which 1 minute (i.e. 60 seconds) is elapsed since epoch 1970-01-01 UTC:
$ date --date=@60
Thu Jan 1 [Link] EAT 1970

4. Display Past Date

You can display a past date using the -date command. Few possibilities are shown below.
$ date --date='3 seconds ago'
Sun Jan 31 [Link] EAT 2016

$ date --date="1 day ago"

Sun May 19 [Link] PDT 2013

$ date --date="yesterday"
Sat Jan 30 [Link] EAT 2016
$ date --date="1 month ago"
Thu Dec 31 [Link] EAT 2015

$ date --date="1 year ago"

Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2014

5. Set Date and Time using –set option

You can set date and time of your system using -s or –set option as shown below..
In this example, initially it displayed the time as [Link]. We then used date command to change it to
[Link].
$ date
Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

$ date -s "Sun May 20 [Link] PDT 2013"

Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

$ date
Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

5. Display Universal Time using -u option

You can display date in UTC format using -u, or –utc, or –universal option as shown below.
$ date
Mon May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

$ date -u
Tue May 21 [Link] EAT 2013

6. Display Last Modification Time using -r option

In this example, the current time is [Link]
$ date
Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

The timestamp of datefile is changed using touch command. This was done few seconds after the above
date command’s output.
$ touch datefile

The current time after the above touch command is [Link]

$ date
Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013

Finally, use the date command -r option to display the last modified timestamp of a file as shown
below. In this example, it displays last modified time of datefile as [Link]. It is somewhere between
[Link] and [Link] (which is when we execute the above touch command to modify the timestamp).
$ date -r datefile
Sun May 20 [Link] EAT 2013
7. Various Date Command Formats
You can use formatting option to display date command in various formats using the following syntax:
$ date +%<format-option>

The following table displays various date command formatting options.

Format options Purpose of Option Output
date +%a Displays Weekday name in short (like Mon, Tue, Wed) Thu
date +%A Displays Weekday name in full short (like Monday, Tuesday) Thursday
date +%b Displays Month name in short (like Jan, Feb, Mar ) Feb
date +%B Displays Month name in full short (like January, February) February
date +%d Displays Day of month (e.g., 01) 07
date +%D Displays Current Date; shown in MM/DD/YY 02/07/13
date +%F Displays Date; shown in YYYY-MM-DD 2013-02-07
date +%H Displays hour in (00..23) format 23
date +%I Displays hour (01..12) format 11
date +%j Displays day of year (001..366) 038
date +%m Displays month (01..12) 02
date +%M Displays minute (00..59) 44
date +%S Displays second (00..60) 17
date +%N Displays nanoseconds (000000000..999999999) 573587606
Displays time; shown as HH:MM:SS
date +%T [Link]
Note: Hours in 24 Format
date +%u Displays day of week (1..7); 1 is Monday 4
Displays week number of year, with Sunday as first day of week
date +%U 05
(00..53)
date +%Y Displays full year i.e. YYYY 2013
date +%Z alphabetic time zone abbreviation (e.g., EDT) IS

The sort command & Options

sort command is used to sort a file, arranging the records in a particular order. By default, the sort
command sorts file assuming the contents are ascii. Using options in sort command, it can also be used
to sort numerically. Let us discuss it with some examples:

File with Ascii data:

Let us consider a file with the following contents:

$ cat file
Unix
Linux
Solaris
AIX
Linux
HPUX

1. sort simply sorts the file in alphabetical order:

$ sort file
AIX
HPUX
Linux
Linux
Solaris
Unix

All records are sorted alphabetically.

2. sort removes the duplicates using the -u option:

$ sort -u file
AIX
HPUX
Linux
Solaris
Unix

The duplicate 'Linux' record got removed. '-u' option removes all the duplicate records in the file. Even
if the file have had 10 'Linux' records, with -u option, only the first record is retained.

File with numbers:

Let us consider a file with numbers:
$ cat file
20
19
5
49
200

3. The default sort 'might' give incorrect result on a file containing numbers:
$ sort file
19
20
200
49
5

In the above result, 200 got placed immediately below 20, not at the end which is incorrect. This is
because the sort did ASCII sort. If the file had not contained '200', the default sort would have given
proper result. However, it is incorrect to sort a numerical file in this way since the sorting logic is
incorrect.

4. To sort a file numericallly:

$ sort -n file
5
19
20
49
200

-n option can sort the decimal numbers as well.

5. sort file numerically in reverse order:

$ sort -nr file
200
49
20
19
5

'r' option does a reverse sort.

Multiple Files:
Let us consider examples with multiple files, say file1 and file2, containing numbers:
$ cat file1
20
19
5
49
200

$ cat file2
25
18
5
48
200

6. sort can sort multiple files as well.

$ sort -n file1 file2
5
5
18
19
20
25
48
49
200
200

The result of sort with multiple files will be a sorted and merged output of the multiple files.

7. Sort, merge and remove duplicates:

$ sort -nu file1 file2
5
18
19
20
25
48
49
200

-u option becomes more handy in case of multiple files. With this, the output is now sorted, merged and
without duplicate records.

Files with multiple fields and delimiter:

Let us consider a file with multiple fields:
$ cat file
Linux,20
Unix,30
AIX,25
Linux,25
Solaris,10
HPUX,100

8. sorting a file containing multiple fields:

$ sort file
AIX,25
HPUX,100
Linux,20
Linux,25
Solaris,10
Unix,30

As shown above, the file got sorted on the 1st field, by default.

9. sort file on the basis of 1st field:

$ sort -t"," -k1,1 file
AIX,25
HPUX,100
Linux,20
Linux,25
Solaris,10
Unix,30

This is being more explicit. '-t' option is used to provide the delimiter in case of files with delimiter. '-k'
is used to specify the keys on the basis of which the sorting has to be done. The format of '-k' is : '-
km,n' where m is the starting key and n is the ending key. In other words, sort can be used to sort on a
range of fields just like how the group by in sql does. In our case, since the sorting is on the 1st field
alone, we speciy '1,1'. Similarly, if the sorting is to be done on the basis of first 3 fields, it will be: '-k
1,3'.

Note: For a file which has fields delimited by a space or a tab, there is no need to specify the "-t" option
since the white space is the delimiter by default in sort.
10. sorting file on the basis of the 2nd field:
$ sort -t"," -k2,2 file
Solaris,10
HPUX,100
Linux,20
AIX,25
Linux,25
Unix,30

11. sorting file on the basis of 2nd field , numerically:

$ sort -t"," -k2n,2 file
Solaris,10
Linux,20
AIX,25
Linux,25
Unix,30
HPUX,100

12. Remove duplicates from the file based on 1st field:

$ sort -t"," -k1,1 -u file
AIX,25
HPUX,100
Linux,20
Solaris,10
Unix,30

The duplicate Linux record got removed. Keep in mind, the command "sort -u file" would not have
worked here becuase both the 'Linux' records are not same, the values were different. However, in the
above, sort is told to remove the duplicates based on the 1st key, and hence the duplicate 'Linux' record
got removed. According to sort, in case of a group of similar records, except the first one, the rest are
considered duplicate.

13. Sort the file numerically on the 2nd field in reverse order:
$ sort -t"," -k2nr,2 file
HPUX,100
Unix,30
AIX,25
Linux,25
Linux,20
Solaris,10

14. sort the file alphabetically on the 1st field, numerically on the 2nd field:
$ sort -t"," -k1,1 -k2n,2 file
AIX,25
HPUX,100
Linux,20
Linux,25
Solaris,10
Unix,30
15. sort a file based on the 1st and 2nd field, and numerically on 3rd field on a file containing 5
columns:
$ sort -t"," -k1,2 -k3n,3 file
File Security Commands

1. chmod command
2. chown command
3. chgrp command
The Chmod Command
Following are the symbolic representation of three different roles:
• u is for user,
• g is for group,
• and o is for others.
Following are the symbolic representation of three different permissions:
• r is for read permission,
• w is for write permission,
• x is for execute permission.
Following are few examples on how to use the symbolic representation on chmod.

1. Add single permission to a file/directory

Changing permission to a single set. + symbol means adding permission. For example, do the
following to give execute permission for the user irrespective of anything else:
$ chmod u+x filename

2. Add multiple permission to a file/directory

Use comma to separate the multiple permission sets as shown below.
$ chmod u+r,g+x filename

3. Remove permission from a file/directory

Following example removes read and write permission for the user.
$ chmod u-rx filename

4. Change permission for all roles on a file/directory

Following example assigns execute privilege to user, group and others (basically anybody can execute
this file).
$ chmod a+x filename
5. Make permission for a file same as another file (using reference)
If you want to change a file permission same as another file, use the reference option as shown below.
In this example, file2’s permission will be set exactly same as file1’s permission.
$ chmod --reference=file1 file2

6. Apply the permission to all the files under a directory recursively

Use option -R to change the permission recursively as shown below.
$ chmod -R 755 directory-name/

7. Change execute permission only on the directories (files are not affected)
On a particular directory if you have multiple sub-directories and files, the following command will
assign execute permission only to all the sub-directories in the current directory (not the files in the
current directory).
$ chmod u+X *

Note: If the files has execute permission already for either the group or others, the above command will
assign the execute permission to the user

The Chown Command

The concept of owner and groups for files is fundamental to Linux. Every file is associated with an
owner and a group. You can use chown and chgrp commands to change the owner or the group of a
particular file or directory.

In this article, we will discuss the ‘chown’ command as it covers most part of the ‘chgrp’ command
also.
Even if you already know this command, probably one of the examples mentioned below might be new
to you.

1. Change the owner of a file

# ls -lart tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown root tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

So we see that the owner of the file was changed from ‘himanshu’ to ‘root’.

2. Change the group of a file

Through the chown command, the group (that a file belongs to) can also be changed.
# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown :friends tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

If you observe closely, the group of the file changed from ‘family’ to ‘friends’. So we see that by just
adding a ‘:’ followed by the new group name, the group of the file can be changed.

3. Change both owner and the group

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown himanshu:friends tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

So we see that using the syntax ‘<newOwner>:<newGroup>’, the owner as well as group can be
changed in one go.

4. Using chown command on symbolic link file

Here is a symbolic link :
# ls -l tmpfile_symlnk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu family 7 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile_symlnk -> tmpfile

So we see that the symbolic link ‘tmpfile_symlink’ links to the file ‘tmpfile’.
Lets see what happens if chown command is issued on a symbolic link:
# chown root:friends tmpfile_symlnk

# ls -l tmpfile_symlnk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu family 7 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile_symlnk -> tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

When the chown command was issued on symbolic link to change the owner as well as the group then
its the referent of the symbolic link ie ‘tmpfile’ whose owner and group got changed. This is the default
behavior of the chown command. Also, there exists a flag ‘–dereference’ for the same.

5. Using chown command to forcefully change the owner/group of symbolic file.

Using flag ‘-h’, you can forcefully change the owner or group of a symbolic link as shown below.
# ls -l tmpfile_symlnk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu family 7 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile_symlnk -> tmpfile

# chown -h root:friends tmpfile_symlnk

# ls -l tmpfile_symlnk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root friends 7 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile_symlnk -> tmpfile

6. Change owner only if a file is owned by a particular user

Using chown “–from” flag, you can change the owner of a file, only if that file is already owned by a
particular owner.
# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown --from=guest himanshu tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown --from=root himanshu tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

• In the example above, we verified that the original owner/group of the file ‘tmpfile’ was
root/friends.
• Next we used the ‘–from’ flag to change the owner to ‘himanshu’ but only if the existing owner
is ‘guest’.
• Now, as the existing owner was not ‘guest’. So, the command failed to change the owner of the
file.
• Next we tried to change the owner if the existing owner is ‘root’ (which was true) and this time
command was successful and the owner was changed to ‘himanshu’.

7. Change group only if a file already belongs to a certain group

Here also the flag ‘–from’ is used but in the following way:
# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown --from=:friends :family tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

Since the file ‘tmpfile’ actually belonged to group ‘friends’ so the condition was correct and the
command was successful.
So we see that by using the flag ‘–from=:<conditional-group-name>’ we can change the group under a
particular condition.
NOTE: By following the template ‘–from=<conditional-owner-name>:<conditional-group-name>’,
condition on both the owner and group can be applied.

8. Copy the owner/group settings from one file to another

This is possible by using the ‘–reference’ flag.
# ls -l file
-rwxr-xr-x 1 himanshu family 8968 2012-04-09 07:10 file

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

# chown --reference=file tmpfile

# ls -l tmpfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 tmpfile

In the above example, we first checked the owner/group of the reference-file ‘file’ and then checked the
owner/group of the target-file ‘tmpfile’. Both were different. Then we used the chown command with
the ‘–reference’ option to apply the owner/group settings from the reference file to the target file. The
command was successful and the owner/group settings of ‘tmpfile’ were made similar to the ‘file’.

9. Change the owner/group of the files by traveling the directories recursively

This is made possible by the ‘-R’ option.
# ls -l linux/linuxKernel
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/linuxKernel

# ls -l linux/ubuntu/ub10
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/ubuntu/ub10

# ls -l linux/redhat/rh7
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/redhat/rh7

# chown -R himanshu:family linux/

# ls -l linux/redhat/rh7
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/redhat/rh7

# ls -l linux/ubuntu/ub10
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/ubuntu/ub10

# ls -l linux/linuxKernel
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu family 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linux/linuxKernel

So we see that after checking the owner/group of all the files in the directory ‘linux’ and its two sub-
directories ‘ubuntu’ and ‘redhat’. We issued the chown command with the ‘-R’ option to change both
the owner and group. The command was successful and owner/group of all the files was changed
successfully.

10. Using chown command on a symbolic link directory

Lets see what happens if we issue the ‘chown’ command to recursively change the owner/group of files
in a directory that is a symbolic link to some other directory.
Here is a symbolic link directory ‘linux_symlnk’ that links to the directory ‘linux’ (already used in
example ‘9’ above) :
$ ls -l linux_symlnk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu family 6 2012-05-22 22:02 linux_symlnk -> linux/
Now, lets change the owner (from himanshu to root) of this symbolic link directory recursively :
# chown -R root:friends linux_symlnk

# ls -l linux_symlnk/
-rw-r--r-- 1 himanshu friends 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linuxKernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 himanshu friends 4096 2012-05-22 21:52 redhat
drwxr-xr-x 2 himanshu friends 4096 2012-05-22 21:52 ubuntu

In the ouput above we see that the owner of the files and directories was not changed. This is because
by default the ‘chown’ command cannot traverse a symbolic link. This is the default behavior but there
is also a flag ‘-P’ for this.

11. Using chown to forcefully change the owner/group of a symbolic link directory
recursively
This can be achieved by using the flag -H
# chown -R -H guest:family linux_symlnk

# ls -l linux_symlnk/
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 guest family 0 2012-05-22 21:52 linuxKernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 guest family 4096 2012-05-22 21:52 redhat
drwxr-xr-x 2 guest family 4096 2012-05-22 21:52 ubuntu

So we see that by using the -H flag, the owner/group of all the files/folder were changed.

12. List all the changes made by the chown command

Use the verbose option -v, which will display whether the ownership of the file was changed or retained
as shown below.
# chown -v -R guest:friends linux
changed ownership of `linux/redhat/rh7' to guest:friends
changed ownership of `linux/redhat' retained to guest:friends
ownership of `linux/redhat_sym' retained as guest:friends
ownership of `linux/ubuntu_sym' retained as guest:friends
changed ownership of `linux/linuxKernel' to guest:friends
changed ownership of `linux/ubuntu/ub10' to guest:friends
ownership of `linux/ubuntu' retained as guest:friends
ownership of `linux' retained as guest:friends

class="title single-title"

chgrp command & Options

CHGRP(CHange GRouP) is one more command which is useful to change group associated to a
file/folder from one group to other in a Linux box. This is sister command to chown which is used to
change owner of the file/folder as well as group name associated with that file.
Learn chgrp with examples:
Example1: Change group name:sales of a file to other group name:hrgroup.
chgrp hrgroup file1

Example2: Give access permissions to a command so that the command can be executed by all users
belonging to apache-admins
chgrp apache-admins /etc/init.d/httpd

Example3: Change group ownership all the files located in /var/apache to group:apache
chgrp -R apache /var/apache

Example4:Change group ownership forcefully

chgrp -f apache /var/apache

Difference between chown and chgrp

1) chown command is used to change ownership as well as group name associated to different one,
where as chgrp can change only group associated to it.
2) Many people say that regular user only able to use chgrp to change the group if the user belongs to
them. But it’s not true a user can use chown and chgrp irrespective to change group to one of their
group because chown is located in /bin folder so every can use it with some limited access.

Usages of chgrp command:

1)Used to change group ownership from one group to other group for a file/folder
2)As a security measure if you want to give permissions to a command to some group you can use this
command.

User and Group Management Commands

The passwd command

As the name suggest passwd command is used to change the password of system users. If the passwd
command is executed by non-root user then it will ask for the current password and then set the new
password of a user who invoked the command. When this command is executed by super user or root
then it can reset the password for any user including root without knowing the current password.
In this post we will discuss passwd command with practical examples.
Syntax :
# passwd {options} {user_name}
Different options that can be used in passwd command are listed below :

Example:1 Change Password of System Users

When you logged in as non-root user like ‘linuxtechi’ in my case and run passwd command then it will
reset password of logged in user.
[linuxtechi@linuxworld ~]$ passwd
Changing password for user linuxtechi.
Changing password for linuxtechi.
(current) UNIX password:
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[linuxtechi@linuxworld ~]$

When you logged in as root user and run passwd command then it will reset the root password by
default and if you specify the user-name after passwd command then it will change the password of that
user.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd linuxtechi
Note : System user’s password is stored in an encrypted form in /etc/shadow file.

Example:2 Display Password Status Information.

To display password status information of a user , use -S option in passwd command.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi PS 2015-09-20 0 99999 7 -1 (Password set, SHA512 crypt.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

In the above output first field shows the user name and second field shows Password status ( PS =
Password Set , LK = Password locked , NP = No Password ), third field shows when the password
was changed and last & fourth field shows minimum age, maximum age, warning period, and inactivity
period for the password

Example:3 Display Password Status info for all the accounts

To display password status info for all the accounts use “-aS” option in passwd command, example is
shown below :
root@localhost:~# passwd -Sa

Example:4 Removing Password of a User using -d option

In my case i am removing/ deleting the password of ‘linuxtechi‘ user.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -d linuxtechi
Removing password for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]#
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi NP 2015-09-20 0 99999 7 -1 (Empty password.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

“-d” option will make user’s password empty and will disable user’s account.
Example:5 Set Password Expiry Immediately
Use ‘-e’ option in passwd command to expire user’s password immediately , this will force the user to
change the password in the next login.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -e linuxtechi
Expiring password for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi PS 1970-01-01 0 99999 7 -1 (Password set, SHA512 crypt.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

Now Try to ssh machine using linuxtechi user.

Example:6 Lock the password of System User

Use ‘-l‘ option in passwd command to lock a user’s password, it will add “!” at starting of user’s
password. A User can’t Change it’s password when his/her password is locked.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -l linuxtechi
Locking password for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi LK 2015-09-20 0 99999 7 -1 (Password locked.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

Example:7 Unlock User’s Password using -u option

[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -u linuxtechi
Unlocking password for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]#

Example:8 Setting inactive days using -i option

-i option in passwd command is used to set inactive days for a system user. This will come into the
picture when password of user ( in my case linuxtechi) expired and user didn’t change its password in
‘n‘ number of days ( i.e 10 days in my case) then after that user will not able to login.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -i 10 linuxtechi
Adjusting aging data for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]#
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi PS 2015-09-20 0 99999 7 10 (Password set, SHA512 crypt.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

Example:9 Set Minimum Days to Change Password using -n option.

In the below example linuxtechi user has to change the password in 90 days. A value of zero shows that
user can change it’s password in any time.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -n 90 linuxtechi
Adjusting aging data for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi PS 2015-09-20 90 99999 7 10 (Password set, SHA512 crypt.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

Example:10 Set Warning days before password expire using -w option

‘-w’ option in passwd command is used to set warning days for a user. It means a user will be warned
for n number of days that his/her password is going to expire.
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -w 12 linuxtechi
Adjusting aging data for user linuxtechi.
passwd: Success
[root@linuxworld ~]# passwd -S linuxtechi
linuxtechi PS 2015-09-20 90 99999 12 10 (Password set, SHA512 crypt.)
[root@linuxworld ~]#

The USERADD command in linux

Example [Link] most used useradd command:
$ sudo useradd -m -d /home/mike1 -s /bin/bash -c "the mike1 user" -U
mike1
Explanation:
• -m -d /home/mike1 : the -m argument creates the /home/mike1 homedirectory, specified by the
-d argument
• -s /bin/bash : the -s is used for specifing the user’s default shell, /bin/bash in this case
• -c “message” : extra information about the user
Example 2:
$ sudo useradd -m -d /home/geeks/mike2 -s /bin/zsh -c "the mike2
user" -u 1099 -g 1050 mike2
Explanation:
• -m -d /home/geeks/mike2 : the -m argument creates the /home/geeks/mike2 homedirectory,
specified by the -d argument . as you can notice, the homedir can be different that
/home/user_name
• -s /bin/zsh : the -s is used for specifing the user’s default shell, /bin/zsh in the case
• -c “the mike2 user” : extra information about the user
• -u 1099 : the new user’s UID, in this case 1099
• -g 1050 : the user belongs to the group with the 1050 GID
Example 3:
$ sudo useradd -m -d /home/mike3 -s /usr/sbin/nologin -c "nologin user" -u 1098 mike3
Explanation:
• -m -d /home/mike3 : the -m argument creates the /home/mike3 homedirectory, specified by the
 -d argument
• -s /usr/sbin/nologin : the -s is used for specifing the user’s default shell, in this case
/usr/sbin/nologin . mike3 cannot login to the system with su, but can login by ssh.
• -c “nologin user” : extra information about the user
• -u 1098 : the new user’s UID, in this case 1098
Example 4:
$ sudo useradd -m -d /home/mike4 -k /etc/[Link] -s /bin/tcsh -c "mike4 user" -u 1097 mike4
Explanation:
• -m -d /home/mike4 : the -m argument creates the /home/mike4 homedirectory, specified by the
-d argument
• -s /bin/tcsh : the -s is used for specifing the user’s default shell, /bin/tcsh in this case
• -k /etc/[Link] : another skeleton directory, /etc/[Link] in this case, different than the
default skeleton directory /etc/skel
• -c “mike4 user” : extra information about the user
• -u 1097 : the new user’s UID, in this case 1097
Example 5:
$ sudo useradd -M -N -r -s /bin/false -c "system user" sys_user
Explanation:
• -M : the -M argument tells the system not to create a home directory
• -N : the -N argument tells the system not to create a group having the user’s name
• -r : the -r arguments is for creating a system user
• -s /bin/false : the -s is used for specifing the user’s default shell, /bin/false in this case. The users
having /bin/false as the default shell, cannot login to the system.
• -c “system user” : extra information about the user

Q: How do you know what default values would be assigned to a user when created using useradd
A: These are the two files which contain the default values to be assigned to a user when created
using useradd
# less /etc/default/useradd
GROUP=100
HOME=/home
INACTIVE=-1
EXPIRE=
SHELL=/href="javascript:void(0);" style="color:#000FFF;text-decoration:underline"
id="Y1697543S6"bin/bash
SKEL=/etc/skel
CREATE_MAIL_SPOOL=yes

You can also view the default parameters set for new user to be created using
# useradd -D
GROUP=100
HOME=/home
INACTIVE=-1
EXPIRE=
SHELL=/bin/bash
SKEL=/etc/skel
CREATE_MAIL_SPOOL=yes

The second file containing values used by useradd command for UID, GID, password encryption
method and expiry related information
# less /etc/[Link]
MAIL_DIR /var/spool/mail

PASS_MAX_DAYS 99999
PASS_MIN_DAYS 0
PASS_MIN_LEN 5
PASS_WARN_AGE 7

UID_MIN 500
UID_MAX 60000

GID_MIN 500
GID_MAX 60000

CREATE_HOME yes
UMASK 077

USERGROUPS_ENAB yes
ENCRYPT_METHOD SHA512

1. How to change default values of useradd command?

Either you can open /etc/default/useradd file and edit the file or you can also do the same
using CLI as shown below

To change the default home directory location for all new users
# useradd -D -b /opt/users
# useradd -D | grep HOME
HOME=/opt/users
To change the default login shell
# useradd -D -s /bin/sh
# useradd -D | grep -i shell
SHELL=/bin/sh
Now what if you want to add custom arguments to your user while creating them. let us discuss in
detail the different options which you can use along with useradd command

2. Create multiple users with same UID

# useradd -o deepak -u 501
# useradd -o deep -u 501
# useradd -o user -u 501

# grep 501 /etc/passwd

deepak:x:501:501::/home/deepak:/bin/sh
deep:x:501:504::/home/deep:/bin/sh
user:x:501:505::/home/user:/bin/sh

3. Manually assign a UID to the user

By default a user automatically gets any free uid more than 500 when you run the useradd command.
But what if you manually want to assign a uid to your user
# useradd -u 550 deepak
Let us verify the assigned uid to deepak
# id deepak
uid=550(deepak) gid=550(deepak) groups=550(deepak)

4. Create user without home directory

# useradd -M test
# su - test
su: warning: cannot change directory to /home/test: No such file or directory

-bash-4.1$ pwd
/root

5. Create user with custom defined home directory

# useradd -d /home/users/test test
# su - test

$ pwd
/home/users/test

6. Add user to different primary group

By default when you run useradd command, a group with the same name is created inside
/etc/group but what if you donot want a group to be created with the same name instead add the
user to some different already existing group.

Here we will create a user "deep" and add him to group "admin" without creating another "deep"
group
# useradd -g admin deep
Verify the groups of user "deep"
# groups deep
deep : admin

7. Add user to different secondary group

In the above command you saw if we are mentioning a different primary group while using useradd
command then a default group with the name of user is NOT created. Now what if you want a group
with username's to be created but instead you want the user to add some secondary group.

Here user deepak is created along with group deepak but also in the same command we are adding
deepak to dba group
# useradd -G dba deepak
Verify groups of deepak
# groups deepak
deepak : deepak dba

8. Add user to multiple groups

You can add the user to multiple secondary groups using single command
# useradd -G admin,dba deepak
Verify
# groups deepak
deepak : deepak admin dba

9. Manually assign a shell to user

Be default when you create a user in Red Hat Linux the user gets /bin/bash shell. But in case you want
to give them some other shell for login use the below command
# useradd -s /bin/sh deepak
# su - deepak

-sh-4.1$ echo $SHELL

/bin/sh
-sh-4.1$

10. Creating a user along with encrypted password

Now you can create a user with pre-defined password, but the condition is the password used should
be href="javascript:void(0);" style="color:#000FFF;text-decoration:underline"
id="Y1697543S8"encrypted which you can do with various methods. Here I will show you one
method to do so

Encrypt your password using below command

# openssl passwd -crypt mypassw0rd
Warning: truncating password to 8 characters
TuUFdiN1KaCHQ
Now you can use the encrypted password for your new user
# useradd -p TuUFdiN1KaCHQ deepak
Try to login to the user, for which the password would be "mypassw0rd"

Usermod Command & Options

Linux command “usermod” is used to modify a user’s information. The files that may be affected
during this operation are /etc/passwd (user account information), /etc/shadow (secure account
information) and /etc/group (group information).
Only root/super user can use this command.
The basic syntax of this command is as follows.
usermod [-c comment] [-d home_dir [-m]] [-e expire_date] [-f inactive_time][-g initial_group] [-
G group [,...]] [-l login_name] [-p passwd][-s shell] [-u uid [-o]] [-L|-U]login

In this article, we will go through some example usages of “usermod” command which will help you to
learn these options in detail.
First we can create a user “test” using useradd. In order to view user information, we can use the “id
command.
# id test
uid=501(test) gid=501(test) groups=501(test)

Example 1: Changing the home directory of user “test”

Suppose the current home directory of the user “test” is /home/test and you want to change it to the
existing directory /home/testnew without copying the contents of /home/test, you can use the following
command.
#usermod –d /home/testnew test

If you want to move the contents of /home/test also (if the new directory doesn’t exist, it will create and
move), you need to use the option “-m”.
#usermod –d /home/testnew –m test

Example 2: Adding groups to a user

When a user is added using “useradd” command without specifying group, then a group with the same
name as that of user will be created. This is the primary group of the user. You can add as many groups
to a user using the option “-G” as follows.
Suppose, you need to add a group “developer” to the user “test”, you can add it as follows.
#usermod –G developer test

Please note that, if you added the user to any other groups earlier (other than the primary group), that
will get removed by the above command.
So, if you want to preserve the current groups of the user and add one more group you need to use the
option –aG as follows.
#usermod –aG developer test
# id test
uid=501(test) gid=501(test) groups=501(test),506(pros),508(developer)

Example 3: Changing the primary group of a user

If you want to add a group as the primary group of the user, you can do it as follows.
# usermod –g developer test
# id test
uid=501(test) gid=508(developer) groups=508(developer), 506(pros)
Example 4: Locking and Unlocking users
In some cases, you may need to temporarily lock the account. This can be done with the “-L” option.
This puts a '!' in front of the encrypted password, effectively disabling the password.
# usermod –L test

User can be unlocked as follows which will remove the '!' in front of the encrypted password.
# usermod –U test

Example 5: Changing the expiry data of an account

You can use the following command to disable the account “test” on 2012-12-01.
usermod -e 2012-12-01 test

Example 6: Changing login and password using usermod

You can change the login name itself using the –l switch.
# usermod –l newtest test

# id test
Id: test: No such user
# id newtest
uid=501(newtest) gid=508(developer) groups=508(developer), 506(pros)

You can change the password as follows.

# usermod –p newpass newtest

Example 7: Changing shell of a user

The “shell” provided to a user can be changed as follows. This will change the shell of “newtest” user
to “/bin/bash”.
# usermod –s /bin/bash newtest
Userdel Command & Options
Maintaining users on the server means add them, modify them and delete them. When a user is no
longer need on the system for any reasons, we should delete it to avoid security breach. On Linux
system we have userdel command to delete a user

What is userdel
Userdel is a low level utility for removing users. On Debian, we should usually use deluser command.
Userdel will look the system account files such as /etc/password and /etc/group. Then it will deleting
all entries related to the user name. The user name must exist before we can delete it.

How to use Userdel

Since userdel will modify system account files, we need root privilege to run it. Otherwise we will
have an error message that saying “only root can do that” or similar. After we gain root privilege, we
can delete a user by typing userdel from your console. Here’s a sample of default usage of userdel
$ sudo userdel pasadena

or
# userdel pasadena

As you see above, we can’t delete a user with name pasadena without root privilege. When we have it,
system give us no error which mean that user is deleted successfully.

Completely remove user home directory

• Using userdel without options, will only delete the user. User home directory will still remain at
/home folder.
• When we go into /home folder, we still seeing pasadena folder which owned by 1002. Created
user will usually have a same group name with user name. 1002 was the UID and GID of
pasadena user name and pasadena group name.
• To completely remove the home user along user deletion, we can use -r option. This option will
also delete user’s mail spool if exist.

Force delete a user

Userdel provide -f option to force user deletion. This option will delete a user even the user still log in
into Linux system. Please take a look a sample screenshot.
Screenshot above show us that pasadena user is logged in to Linux system. It is marked by process
6218 which is SSHD process. But when we do “userdel -f pasadena” the command only show us the
information that the user is logged in. The command itself was succeed. If we see the content of
/etc/passwd file using cat command, we don’t see pasadena user there. It’s home directory still exist
but the owner is changed.
One thing that we must know that, userdel with -f option did not broke the SSH connection. So the
user actually still logged in and active even the user is not exist. But when the user log off, the the user
can not log in anymore because that user has been deleted.
So this options is dangerous to use since it can lead your system into inconsistent state.

Chage Command & Options

The command name ‘chage’ is an acronym for ‘change age’. This command is used to change the user
password aging / expiry information. Any user can execute this command with ‘-l’ option to view their
password aging information. No users can view the password aging/expiry information of other users.
As root, you can execute this command to modify the users aging information.

Chage command syntax

chage [-m mindays] [-M maxdays] [-d lastday] [-I inactive] [-E expiredate] [-W warndays]
user

We can go through some examples to get a better understanding of this command.

TASK 1: Use chage command to list the password aging information of a user
chage –l testuser
Output:
Last password change : May 01, 2012
Password expires : never
 Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : 0
Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

As you can see, password expiration is disabled for this user.

TASK 2: Disable password aging for a user

chage -I -1 -m 0 -M 99999 -E -1 testuser

• -I -1 : This will set the “Password inactive” to never

• -m 0 : This will set the minimum number of days between password change to 0
• -M 99999 : This will set the maximum number of days between password change to 99999
• -E -1 : This will set “Account expires” to never.
This will disable the password expiry of a user if it is already enabled.

TASK 3: Enable password expiry date of a user

In most cases, as an administrator, you need to set password expiry for all users for better security.
Once you enable password expiry date for a user, the user will be forced to change their password from
the next login after the expiry date.
chage -M 20 testuser
Output
Last password change : May 01, 2012
Password expires : May 21, 2012
Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : 0
Maximum number of days between password change : 20
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

TASK 4 : Set the Account expiry date in the format ‘YYYY-MM-DD’

chage –E “2012-05-28”

Output
Last password change : May 01, 2012
Password expires : May 21, 2012
Password inactive : never
Account expires : May 28, 2012
Minimum number of days between password change : 0
Maximum number of days between password change : 20
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
TASK 5: Set the password expiry warning message
By default, this value is set to 7. So, when a user logins prior to 7 days of expiry, he will start to get
warning about password expiry. If you want it to change to 10 days, you can do it as follows.
chage –W 10 testuser

TASK 6: Forcing the users to change the password on next logon

When you create a new user account, you can set it to force the user to change the password when he
login for the first time as follows,
chage –d 0 testuser

This will reset “Last Password Change” to “Password must be changed”

How to create groups in Linux with: groupadd

$ sudo groupadd mikegr
$ < /etc/group grep mikegr
mikegr:x:1022:
With groupadd and no arguments, a new group will be with the default setting. The GID will be the
first one available, bigger than 1000 (because from 1 to 999 the GIDs are reserved).
You can also create a group with a customized GID:
$ sudo groupadd -g 1033 starwarsmovie
$ < /etc/group grep starwarsmovie starwarsmovie:x:1033:
It is not recommended to create a password protected group with groupadd -p because you're password
will be stored in /etc/gshadow in clear format, not encrypted. (unless you give groupadd -p a crypted
password as an argument)
$ sudo groupadd -p "[Link]" geekster
$ < /etc/group grep geekster geekster:x:1035: $ sudo < /etc/gshadow
grep geekster geekster:[Link]::

Deleting a group is very simple with groupdel:

$ sudo groupdel geekster
We did not get any output, so the group has been succesfully deleted.
If you need to change the group settings, use groupmod:
$ groupmod
Usage: groupmod [options] GROUP
Options:
-g, --gid GID change the group ID to GID
-h, --help display this help message and exit
-n, --new-name NEW_GROUP change the name to NEW_GROUP
-o, --non-unique allow to use a duplicate (non-unique) GID
-p, --password PASSWORD change the password to this (encrypted)
PASSWORD

How to create users with custom primary and secondary groups:

I will create the groups and set them as primary and secondary groups for the new created user:
Creating the groups jim, michael and johnson:
$ sudo groupadd jim
$ sudo groupadd michael
$ sudo groupadd johnson
Verifing if the groups have been created, and finding out their GIDs:
$ tail -3 /etc/group
jim:x:1039:
michael:x:1040:
johnson:x:1041:
Creating the test3 user with jim as primary group and michael and johnson as secondary groups with
useradd:
the -g parameter is for adding the user to the primary group, and -G for the secondary groups. Only
one group can be set as primary group.
$ sudo useradd -g jim -G michael,johnson test3
$ id test3
uid=1015(test3) gid=1039(jim)
groups=1039(jim),1040(michael),1041(johnson)
The GID displayed in the id commands’s output is the ID of the primary group.
Creating the test4 user with the same primary and secondary groups as test3, by using the GIDs:
$ sudo useradd -g 1039 -G 1040,1041 test4
$ id test4
uid=1016(test4) gid=1039(jim)
groups=1039(jim),1040(michael),1041(johnson)

How to add an existing user to primary and secondary groups:

I will create the user test5 and add him in primary and secondary groups, by using the names and the
GIDs.
$ sudo usermod -g group3 -G group4,group5 test5
$ sudo -g 3000 -G 4000,5000 test6
Usermod is used for changing the user account information. The usermod command’s parameters are
the same as the useradd parameters: -g for primary group and -G for secondary groups.

How to remove users from secondary groups:

The gpasswd command is used for working with groups.
How to remove a user from a group with gpasswd: gpasswd -d username groupname.
$ id test4
uid=1016(test4) gid=1039(jim)
groups=1039(jim),1040(michael),1041(johnson)
$ sudo gpasswd -d test4 johnson
Removing user test4 from group johnson
$ id test4
uid=1016(test4) gid=1039(jim) groups=1039(jim),1040(michael)
To remove a user’s primary group, set a new group as primary for that user and after that, remove the
user from the old primary group.

The chgrp Command Examples

This tutorial explains Linux “chgrp” command, options and its usage with examples.
“chgrp” command is used to change group ownership of a file/directory. This post describes “chgrp”
command used in Linux along with usage examples and/or output.
All files in linux belong to an owner, and a group. The owner is set by the “chown” command, and the
group by the “chgrp” command.
Usage:
chgrp [OPTION]… GROUP FILE…
chgrp [OPTION]… –reference=RFILE FILE…
Here’s the listing of example usage of command. :
Note:
Before using “chgrp” command, You should be aware of the users existing in your system, otherwise
you will get “Invalid user name” Error.
To see the list of the users, You may use(cat /etc/group). But if you still want to add a particular user ,
then run in the terminal following command and then use “chgrp” command accordingly:
sudo addgroup user_name_to_add

1. To change the group name of a file(chgrp group_name file_name):

sanfoundry-> touch [Link]
sanfoundry-> ls -l [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu himanshu 0 Jun 12 18:57 [Link]
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp user [Link]
sanfoundry-> ls -l [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 18:57 [Link]
sanfoundry->

As you can see, Here user for the [Link] was “himanshu” and after executing the “chgrp” command,
user_name has been changed to “user”.
2. To change the group name of a folder(chgrp group_name folder_name):
sanfoundry-> mkdir sample_folder
sanfoundry-> ls -l
drwxrwxr-x 2 himanshu himanshu 4096 Jun 12 19:04 sample_folder

sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp user sample_folder/

sanfoundry-> ls -l
drwxrwxr-x 2 himanshu user 4096 Jun 12 19:04 sample_folder

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As you can see, Here user for the folder sample_folder was “himanshu” and after executing the “chgrp”
command, user_name has been changed to “user”.
3. To change the group name of all contents in a folder(chgrp -R group_name folder_name):
“-R” option is for the recursive changes in the folder.
sanfoundry-> mkdir sample_folder
sanfoundry-> cd sample_folder/
sanfoundry-> touch x y
sanfoundry-> mkdir folder1
sanfoundry-> cd ..
sanfoundry-> ls -l sample_folder/
total 4
drwxrwxr-x 2 himanshu himanshu 4096 Jun 12 19:09 folder1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu himanshu 0 Jun 12 19:09 x
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu himanshu 0 Jun 12 19:09 y
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp -R user sample_folder/
sanfoundry-> ls -l sample_folder/
total 4
drwxrwxr-x 2 himanshu user 4096 Jun 12 19:09 folder1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 19:09 x
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 19:09 y

4. To print the verbose messages when changes made in the ownership(chgrp -c group_name file/folder
name):
sanfoundry-> touch [Link]
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp -c user [Link]
changed group of `[Link]' from himanshu to user

5. To use group name of a file instead of specifying a particular group_name( chgrp -–reference=file1
file2):
sanfoundry-> touch [Link] [Link]
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp user [Link]
sanfoundry-> ls -l [Link] [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 19:19 [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu himanshu 0 Jun 12 19:19 [Link]
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp --reference=[Link] [Link]
sanfoundry-> ls -l [Link] [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 19:19 [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 12 19:19 [Link]

As you can see from the above example, [Link] has group name “user” and with –reference option that
has been given to the file “[Link]” and now both shares a common group name,”user”.
6. output a diagnostic for every file processed(chgrp -v group_name file_name):
sanfoundry-> touch [Link]
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp -v user [Link]
changed group of `[Link]' from himanshu to user

7. To change the group name of link files(chgrp –dereference group_name … file_name):

To create a symbolic link for a file, say [Link], You have to use ln -s command:
sanfoundry-> touch [Link]
sanfoundry-> ln -s [Link] symbolic_link

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Here file symbolic_link is the link_name for file [Link].
* with “-dereference” option the group name of actual file pointed by symbolic_link gets changed.
* with “-no-dereference” option the group name of symbolic_link gets changed itself.
sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp --dereference user symbolic_link
sanfoundry-> ls -l symbolic_link [Link]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 himanshu user 0 Jun 13 00:43 [Link]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu himanshu 5 Jun 13 00:43 symbolic_link -> [Link]

sanfoundry-> sudo chgrp --no-dereference hello symbolic_link

sanfoundry-> ls -l symbolic_link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu hello 5 Jun 13 00:43 symbolic_link -> [Link]

From the above example, You can see that with “–dereference” option the group name of the linked file
[Link] has been changed and group name of symbolic_link remains the same. But with “–no-
dereference” option the group name of the symbolic link has been changed itself.
8. To change the group name of symbolic link itself without “–no-dereference” option(chgrp -h
group_name link_name):
sanfoundry-> sudo hello -h user symbolic_link
sanfoundry-> ls -l symbolic_link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 himanshu hello 5 Jun 13 00:43 symbolic_link -> [Link]

Some more options for chgrp

* “-f” To suppress most of the error messages
* “-RL” To traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered
Note:
* As a security measure if you want to give permissions to a command to some group you can use this
command.
* “chown” command is used to change ownership as well as group name associated to different one,
where as “chgrp” can change only group associated to it.