Common Solaris Shell Commands

The cd command changes your current working directory to the directory you specify.

Example:

% cd ~/www/htdocs/

The pwd command prints your current (or present) working directory. Simply type pwd and hit return to display your current working directory.

Example:

% pwd

The ls command is used to list the file in the directory specified, or if you do not specify a directory, the current working directory. You can also add some additional arguments to customize the list display.

If you type ls -F it will append a forward slash to the subdirectory names so you can easily distinguish them from file names.

If you type ls -a it will show all hidden files. Hidden files begin with a dot (.), i.e. .htaccess files.

If you type ls -l it will show detailed information about each file and directory, including permissions, ownership, file size, and when the file was last modified.

You can also mix the arguments. If you type ls -aF you will see a list of all file names (including hidden files) and a forward slash will be appended to directory names.

Example:

% ls -al

The cat command displays the contents of filename. If you want to display the file one screen at a time try cat [filename] | more or simply more [filename].

Example:

% cat ~/var/log/messages

The mkdir command makes a new directory with the name directory, that you specify.

Example:

% mkdir myfiles

The rmdir command removes the directory that you specify.

Example:

% rmdir myfiles

The cp command creates a copy of source-file with the name target-file. You can specify pathnames as part of the file specification. If target-file exists it is overwritten.

Example:

% cp index.html ~/www/htdocs/index.html

The mv command renames a file or moves it to a new location. You can specify pathnames as part of the file specification. If target-file exists it is overwritten.

Example:

% mv ~/www/htdocs/index.html ~/www/vhosts/mydomain/index.html

The rm command deletes (removes) a file. To remove a directory and eveyrthing inside, you can use the -r (recursive) flag (e.g. rm -r filename). You can specify pathnames as part of the file name specification.

Example:

% rm ~/www/htdocs/old-index.html

The grep command finds lines in files that match specified text patterns. You can specify pathnames as part of the file specification. For example if you want to search for the pattern gif in all html files in your current working directory, you would type grep gif *.html and hit return. The grep command would then list all occurrences of gif it finds in .html files in the current working directory.

Example:

% grep href *.html

The tar command copies a file or files to or from an archive. To put all the files in a directory into one tar format file, simply type tar -cvf tarfile directory at a telnet command prompt and replace tarfile with the name you want to call your archived file, and replace directory with the name of the directory that contains the files you want to compress.

To extract the files from a tar format archive, simply type tar -xvf tarfile at a telnet command prompt and replace tarfile with the name of the archived file you are extracting.

For example, you could type tar -cvf pages.tar htdocs at a telnet command prompt to archive the files in the htdocs directory to a tar format file called pages.tar. To view the contents of the pages.tar tarfile without extracting them, type tar -tvf pages.tar. This will display all files that are included in the tar archive. You could also type tar -xvf pages.tar at a telnet command prompt to extract the files in the archive pages.tar into your current directory.

Example:

% tar -cvf mysite.tar ~/www/htdocs/