While cPanel & WHM automates many server administration tasks, familiarity with the Linux® command line can prove useful for both WHM and cPanel users.

This documentation gives a brief overview of some basic Linux commands that you may wish to use as you manage your website or server.

 

Common Linux commands

Note:

To execute a command, enter the command with any options or arguments that it requires and press Enter.

The following table lists some basic Linux commands and their functions:

Command Description
ls

List files and directories that exist within your current directory. This command resembles the dir command in Windows®.

To view dotfiles (filenames that begin with a period) and additional file and directory details, add the -al options to the command:

ls -al
cd location

Navigate between directories.

Replace location with the path to the directory that you wish to navigate to. For example, to navigate to the /usr/local/apache/ directory, run the following command:

cd /usr/local/apache/
cat filename

Print the contents of the specified file to the CLI.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to view. For example, to print the contents of the filename.txt file, run the following command:

cat filename.txt

Note:

To view the data that currently displays on your server's console screen, run the following command:

cat /dev/vcs1
tail filename

Print the last 20 lines of a file to the command-line interface (CLI).

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to view. For example, to print the last 20 lines of the filename.txt file, run the following command:

tail filename.txt

You can add an argument to change the number of lines that this command prints. For example, to print the last 100 lines of the filename.txt file, run the following command:

tail -100 filename.txt
more filename

Print the contents of a file to the CLI, one screen at a time.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to view. For example, to print the contents of the filename.txt file one screen at a time, run the following command:

more filename.txt

 
pico filename

Open the specified file in the pico text editor.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to edit. For example, to open the filename.txt file in the pico editor, run the following command:

pico filename.txt
vi filename

Open the specified file in the vi text editor.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to edit. For example, to open the filename.txt file in the vi editor, run the following command:

vi filename.txt
grep string filename

Search for a string in a specified file, and prints each line that contains a match to the CLI.

Replace string with a single word, or multiple words within single quotes (''). Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to search. For example, to search for the string coffee filters in the grocerylist.txt file, run the following command:

grep 'coffee filters' grocerylist.txt
touch filename

Create an empty file in the specified location.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to create. For example, to create an empty example.txt file, run the following command:

touch example.txt
ln -s file1 file2

Create a symbolic link between the two specified files.

Replace file1 with the relative path to the existing file, and file2 with the relative path to the new symbolic link file. For example, to create the symlink-file.txt file and point it to the /pointtome/file.txt file, run the following command:

ln -s /pointtome/file.txt symlink-file.txt
rm filename

Delete the specified file. After you run this command, the system prompts you to confirm the file's deletion.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file that you wish to delete. For example, to delete the trash.txt file, run the following command:

rm trash.txt
last List which users recently logged in and the timestamp for each login.
w List currently logged-in users and the location from which they logged in.
netstat List all of the server's current network connections.
file filename

Guess a file's type, based on the file's contents.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file for which you want the system to guess the type. For example, to cause the system to guess the type for the example.txt file, run the following command:

file filename
du Show the system's current disk usage for each directory and subdirectory.
wc filename

Display the word count for a specific file.

Replace filename with the relative path to the file for which you wish to view a word count. For example, to display a word count for the example.txt file, run the following command:

wc example.txt
cp file1 file2

Copy a file into a new file.

Replace file1 with the relative path to the existing file, and file2 with the relative path to the new copy file that you wish to create. For example, to copy the contents of the original.txt file to the /copies/duplicate.txt file, run the following command:

cp original.txt /copies/duplicate.txt
chmod permissions filename

Change a file's octal permissions.

Replace permissions with the three-digit octal permissions that you wish to grant to the file, and replace filename with the relative path to the file for which you wish to alter the permissions. For example, to change the permissions of the myfile.txt file to 755, run the following command:

chmod 755 myfile.txt

For more information, read the Wikipedia article about the chmod command.
chown user:group filename

Change a file's user and group ownership.

Replace user with the user to whom you wish to grant ownership of the file, group with the group name, and filename with the relative path to the file. For example, to grant the user joe in the group joesgroup ownership of the joesfile.txt file, run the following command:

chown joe:joesgroup joesfile.txt
whereis name

Query applications that match the name value.

You can find the most common applications in the following locations:

  • /usr/sbin/sendmail
  • /usr/bin/perl
  • /bin/mail
  • /usr/bin/php
ps

Return information about the server's current processes.

To view all of the running processes, run one of the following commands:

ps -auxww
ps -cef

Run multiple commands on the same line

Various command-line tasks may require that you use different commands on the same line. Linux includes easy methods to perform these tasks.

  • Use the pipe character (|) to retrieve data from one program and "pipe" it to another program.
  • Use a single greater-than bracket (>) to create a new file if the file does not already exist, or to overwrite any existing content if the file does exist.
  • Use a double greater-than bracket (>>) to create a new file if the file does not already exist, or to append the new data to the file if the file does exist.
  • Use a single less-than bracket (<) to send input from a file to a command.

The table below lists examples of how to combine tasks into a single line:

Command Description 
grep User /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf | more
 This command searches for all of the lines in the httpd.conf file that matches the user search term, and then prints the results to your terminal one screen at a time. 
last -a > /root/lastlogins.tmp
 This command prints all of the current login histories to the /root/lastlogins.tmp file. 
tail -10000 /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep 'example\.com' | more

This command finds the last 10,000 lines from the /var/log/exim_mainlog file, searches those lines for all occurrences of the string example.com, and then prints the search results to your terminal one screen at a time.

Note:

The system treats periods (.) in command as wildcard characters. Precede each period with a backslash (\) to instruct grep to interpret the period literally.

 
netstat -an | grep :80 | wc -l
 This command shows the number of active connections to Apache (Apache's httpd daemon runs on port 80). 
mysql --skip-column-names --batch -e 'show processlist' | wc -l
 This command lists the number of MySQL threads. If subselect expressions start new threads, the output of the show processlist command includes them.

Common configuration files and directories

You can find common configuration files and directories in the following locations on your server:

Service Locations
Exim 
/etc/exim.conf
/var/log/exim_mainlog
/var/log/exim_rejectlog
/etc/valiases/
/etc/vfilters/
home/username/.forward
MySQL® 
/root/.my.cnf
/etc/my.cnf
/var/lib/mysql/
Apache 
/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
/usr/local/apache/domlogs/
System 
/var/log/messages
/var/log/dmesg
ProFTPD 
/etc/proftpd.conf
/var/log/xferlog
/etc/proftpd/
SSH 
/etc/ssh/sshd_config

 

Additional documentation

 

Ця відповідь Вам допомогла? 0 Користувачі, які знайшли це корисним (0 Голосів)

Найпопулярніші

How To Access cPanel/WHM Via Command Line As The Root User

It is true that cPanel & WHM automates many of the server administration tasks that you may...
How To Resolve Empty cPanel CPU/Concurrent Usage Snapshot

When a CloudLinux user hits LVE limits, appropriate faults are generated and lvestats package...
How To Implement cPanel Firewalls On AWS & Google Cloud

If you are using a public cloud such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Alibabacloud...
How To Check Your cPanel & WHM Server Ports As An Admin

For a Linux instance, follow these steps to verify the security group rule: Connect to a Linux...
How To Check cPanel Log Files With Location and Description

First of all, some of these locations do change as cPanel release new versions. If you are...