Ubuntu on Windows, of course, comes with the ssh client, enabling you to ssh directly to any other Linux system that has an ssh server ( openssh-server, in Ubuntu) installed.

Ubuntu Command Line Programs How To Get Started

In Part 1, I introduced the topic, and in Part 2, I showed how to get started by installing Windows.

In this part of our series, Ill describe a handful of essential commands to help get started.

When multiple matching options exist, you can press to list all available options.

Simply type man and youll enter a page viewer, where you can learn all about whatever youre trying to better understand.

All Ubuntu manpages are also rendered to HTML, and you can search and read them at manpages.ubuntu.com.

Heck, lets read the manpage for man, itself.

Read more about it in the manpage here, and try the following.

Ubuntu Command Line Programs Software From Your

Its the command-line tool that enables you to add and remove software from your Ubuntu shell.

You can search for software, install packages, remove packages, update, and upgrade your system.

Read more about apt in the manpage here, and try the following.

To use a pipe, you simply add the character to the end of your command, and then start typing your next command.

In the rest of the examples below, you will build more and more advanced processing on the command line, through the use of pipes.

Like piping text to grep, you can pipe data directly to sed, and using regular expressions, you can replace text.

This is super handy for automating lots of tasks, updating files, and countless other things.

Heres a simple example were going to print ( cat ) a file, and then replace all of the colons (:) with three whitespaces.

Note that were not going to actually edit the file (though we could ).

You can spend the next year of your life becoming an awk expert.

But lets just look at a super simple example, thats always handy Lets say you want to split some text into a column, and only get the first column.

Well build on our previous example, to get a list of users on the local system.

Basically, you can run the same command over and over, against a variable that changes.

Lets say that we wanted to say hello to each of those users we just listed.

Lets look at our system log, and then try piping it through less, moving up and down with the arrow keys and PgUp and PgDn keys.