Which terminal on kali linux

There is another redirection we need to know is the command pipe. In short, we can combine the output of each command and use it on next command using | character.

command 1 | command 2 | command 3

For an example we need to read a file then short the results and finally use grep command to filter out some text strings. Here we are going to extract files starting with ‘test.‘. So we need to use following commands combining with |

cat ls-list.txt | sort | grep test

We can see in the output in the following screenshot:

Basic Kali Linux Commands

Now, let’s drive into Kali Linux usage and explore some basic Kali Linux (Linux, in general) commands.

Man Pages

Most of the executable programs on the Linux command line contains a formal piece of documentation is called manual pages or man pages . A special program called man is used to view these pages. Man pages generally have a name, a synopsis, a description of the command’s purpose, and the corresponding options, parameters, or switches. Let’s look at the man page for the ls (list) command:

This will show us the manual of ls command, as we can see in the following screenshot:

We can see in the top of the above screenshot that ls is ‘User Command’. Man pages are organized by dividing into various sections as following:

1. User commands.
2. System administration commands.
3. Programming interfaces for kernel system calls.
4. Programming interfaces to the C library.
5. Special files such as device nodes and drivers.
6. File formats.
7. Games and amusements such as screen-savers.
8. Miscellaneous.

To know more about a command we can search a keyword. For example, we need to learn about the file format of /etc/passwd file. We can apply following command to learn more about this:

The above command will show information about passwd command as we can see in the following screenshot:

We can see the output on the following screenshot:

We also can filter out the search by using regular expression .

In the above command, the regular expression is enclosed by a caret (^) and dollar sign ($), to match the entire line and avoid sub-string matches. The output shows in the following screenshot:

We can now look at the exact passwd manual page (5) we are interested in by referencing the appropriate section:

Man pages are usually the quickest way to learn more about a Linux command. So we need to take some time and explore the man pages.

Apropos

By using apropos command we can see a list of all topics in the man pages. Although this is a bit raw, it’s often helpful for finding a specific command based on the description. For an example , we want to partition a hard drive but can’t remember the name of the command. We can figure this out with an apropos search for «partition».

We can see the commands list with description in the following screenshot:

Check that apropos have similar output like man -k , in fact both are the same.

List

The ls command prints a basic file listing on the directory to the terminal window. We can modify the output results with various flags. Like -a flag is used to display all files (including hidden files) and the -1 option displays each file on a single line, which is very useful for automatic scripts.

Change Directories

Linux does not use Windows-style drive letters (C:\). Here, all files, folders, and devices are baby of the root directory, represented by the / character (see our Kali Linux file system article). In our terminal can use the cd command followed by a path to change to the specified directory. The pwd command will print our current directory (which is helpful if we get lost inside files) and running cd will return to the home directory (/home/username). To understand this we need to check the following screenshot and practice it by our own.

To return back from a directory to it’s parent/previous directory we can use cd .. command.

Creating Directories

We can use mkdir command followed by the name of our new directory to create a new directory. Directory names can be contains space in middle, but when we are using command line interface it will be easier to work with directory names using underscores or hyphens instead.

To create a new file we can use touch command followed by the name of our new file. Example of mkdir and touch command is shown in the following screenshot:

We also can create multiple directories at a same time using -p flag. -p is capable to create directories inside parent directory. Suppose we need to add 2 directories inside our newly created (above example) directory (which is /home/kali/new_folder/baby-new-folder). We can do it from our home by using -p as shown in the following command:

mkdir -p /home/kali/new_folder/baby-new-folder/

We can see the output in following screenshot:

Searching for Files

There are three most common Linux commands for searching files on terminal, those are which , locate and find . Utilities of these commands are similar but work and output of these utilities are different.

Which

which command searches between the directories that are defined in the $PATH environment variable for a given file name. This variable contains a listing of all the directories that Kali Linux searches when a command is applied without its path. If a match is found, which returns the full path of the file as shown below:

Locate

The locate command is the quickest way to find the locations of files and directories in Kali Linux. To do the search on a much shorter search time, locate searches a built-in database named locate.db rather than checking the entire hard disk. This database is automatically updated on a regular basis by the cron scheduler. To manually update the locate.db database, we can use the sudo updatedb command.

Find

The find command is the most complex and flexible tool in these three. Understanding it’s syntax sometimes very hard, but it is very powerful than a normal search. In the following screenshot we did the most basic search using find command, where we start our search from root directory (/) and look for the filename starts with sbd.

Where which and locate command searches files by using their names, find can search files by it’s name, type, size, time, permissions etc. find is an complex yet very powerful search tool. We can know more about it here .

In our this part we just covered the basics terminal uses and some basic Linux commands. We will about more commands on our upcoming parts. Hope this article was enjoyable and informative.

Love our articles? Make sure to follow us on Twitter and GitHub , we post article updates there. To join our KaliLinuxIn family, join our Telegram Group . We are trying to build a community for Linux and Cybersecurity. For anything we always happy to help everyone on the comment section . As we know our comment section is always open to everyone. We read each and every comment and we always reply .

Источник