I was meeting with a younger friend to fix his virus laden laptop, it turned out to be quite a mess so we decided it would be more efficient to restore it from the recovery partition. I was a bit surprised to discover that his understanding of the command line was essentially a mystery.
This column will be examining various Linux commands that can be used in scripting or while working on the command line. Wherever possible I will also demonstrate similar functionality for windows batch files. It is actually possible to do some basic scripting on windows but on a limited scale unless you install some additional product to help out.
Eventually, I am hoping to go beyond a “random” collection of commands and turn them into scripts to actually do useful work.
Basic commands
| Linux | Windows | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ls | dir | This command lists the files in the current working directory |
| cd | cd | change directory to either a fully qualified directory name or to a subdirectory within the current directory |
| rm | del | delete the filename in the current directory |
| rmdir | rmdir | remove either a fully qualified directory name or to a subdirectory within the current directory |
| clear | cls | erases the screen and puts the cursor in the upper left hand corner |
Linux command options
| Command | option | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ls | -l | directory listing in long format |
| ls | -lt | directory listing in date/time descending order |
| ls | -ltr | directory listing in date/time ascending order |
| ls | -lSr | directory listing in long format sorted by filesize ascending. |
| ls | -1 | directory listing only filenames |
| ls | -1 | directory listing only filenames |
| rm | -r | removes subdirectories and their containing files |
| rm | -f | ignore nonexistent files, never prompt |
| rmdir | removes empty directories |
Windows command options
| Command | option | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| dir | /od | directory listing order by date ascending |
| dir | /os | directory listing order increasing by size |
| dir | /b | directory listing displaying filenames only |
| dir | /oe | directory listing sorted by file extension |
| del | /f | Force deleting of read-only files |
| del | /s | recursively remove directories and their files |
