Web Design and Development Blog - Rochester MN

If you’ve ever watched a server administrator when they are noodling around the server you’d see a bunch of lines keep zipping up the screen. You’ve probably wondered what could they possibly be learning from this information? Although many system administrators know a large array of Linux/Unix commands there are a few that will get you started (and keep you from breaking things in the process).

Commands:

du
this command give you the list of all the files and sub-directories within the directory you are currently logged into. This is great except the numbers on the left don’t really mean much. (In actuality they are the file sizes in “blocks” however to read this in kilobytes, megabytes etc you’ll need to add a parameter).

du -h
Ah, now things are looking more familiar, but I’m still getting a giant list of files. What if you wanted to get the size of all the directories including the files?

du -sh
Now its looking better (however you may be getting permission errors depending on your user account privileges). What if you wanted to look at one specific directory (the same as doing a right-click > preferences in windows)?

du -sh myfolder
There we go. Now you have the size of the entire directory, just like you have in windows.

Now you’re probably wondering how do I move between a folder?

cd directory_name

There we go now we can go into a directory but what if we want to get out of it?

cd ..

You can keep adding ../../../ etc until you are back to where you want to be, or to get to the root of your users level type in
cd /

if you want to know what directories / files you have in your directory you would use the ls command.

ls

You should try this with your own linux system and don’t worry, with only those commands you cannot mess anything up. this only allows you to look at the server. Have fun!

~RDS