For anyone looking, there have been several great HN threads about UNIX commands, here are just a few:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360320

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985393

I have also created a couple screencasts about the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the-fil... and a "Crash Course on Common Commands" @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash-course-on-common-...

It would help a LOT if these were organized by something other than alphabet, or if these had some kind of five-word snippet describing what each command does. This is one of the few instances where alphabetizing doesn't do us any good -- if we knew what our command started with, we could just search for it.

UNIX Power Tools by O'Reilly & Associates remains one of the best collections of these tips and tricks I've found.

It's now nearly 20 years old, and the most recent (3rd) edition was published in 2002, and very likely could use some very serious updating, though it still remains useful. But in terms of books that really bumped up my game for understanding Unix (then dominant) and Linux, this book was key.

Well I find the unix in a nutshell book to be an invaluable desktop reference if I have senior moment and need to look something up.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596100292.do

And its probaly easier to use

http://www.commandlinefu.com/ is a good place to look for examples.

That site hurts my eyes.

Blimey, you're not kidding.

Just for your own amusement..... I followed the link so that I could come back and say how wrong you were. My head ache is your payoff!!!!!! :)

I guess the site is themed resembling Hercules graphics terminal, or some like that.

Pointless minutiae:

Hercules was a video card, not a terminal. The color for monochrome is defined by the monitor, of course. Green phosphor CRTs were quite common in the IBM PC world (starting with IBM's original 5151 monitor I think), but for terminals actually used on Unix machines other colors were more typical. The VT-100 series were blue, I believe; and later DEC terminals went with amber. White was reasonably common. I don't think I ever used a real terminal on a Unix box with a green phosphor.

My mistake, i was remembering old pc 8086 with hercules card and green monitor. Also that look resembled the ibm3151 green terminals, but i liked more the yellowish ones.

Yep, green on black, classical nix terminal. :) Even Matrix uses this colour scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U

Good old times piloting a cp500. I remember the chicken game crossing the street! That was epic!

Is it just me or does this seem like man pages but on the web? I applaud the effort but still, seems like it would make more sense spend this time and teach ppl how to use the man command.

Searched for nmap, got this sweet exception:

CException Property "SiteController.bodyClass" is not defined.

Maybe later then!

Thanks for pointing out this exception. Exception shouldn't be outputted... As for nmap, it is missing from the database, and will be added. If you spot any other missing command later, feel free to use the 'give feedback' button.

Just added a 'ps' entry on your website.

Having examples for using nmap can be really hand to get an idea of what you do with it, and there's a lot you can do.

I like the idea of this site anyway, good luck in your further developments!

If it helps, I searched for nmap, a bunch of completely unrelated results showed up, which didn't include nmap ;)

Looks cool. Is there a github repo somewhere where we can send pull requests? It's missing stuff like systemctl.

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to suggest other commands missing by using the 'give feeback' link on the page any time you find one. Missing commands pointed out will be added.

This is excellent. Just what I was looking for as a Linux novice.