list of ~10 Linux commands that can be useful

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A comprehensive list of Linux commands would be a long one! Here are ~10 commands that can be useful, with usage scenarios from scientific computing. (Note that the venerable rsync command has its own page.)

finger info on users currently logged in
always nice to know who else is running jobs on the cluster
head display first few lines of a file or text stream
when compiler barfs error messages, pipe to head and start debugging with the first one!
history display list of previously issued commands
combines well with grep to quickly isolate that hard-to-remember command
ldd list shared libraries on which an executable depends
great for troubleshooting those pesky errors in the linking portion of the compile-link process
readlink -f display a file or directory's absolute path
in most terminals, double-clicking will highlight the path for copying to the clipboard
sed perform transformation on input text stream
can be used with regular expressions and the -i flag to update, say, a filepath present in multiple files
sort sort lines of a file or text stream in a specified order
sort -n is especially useful when dealing with numerical data
tail -f display end of file, with updates
with -f, tail will monitor, e.g., output data file, displaying new data as it's appended
tee write standard input to both standard output and a file
when compiling a large piece of software, use tee to both loosely monitor for errors and save complete record
top show real-time statistics of system resource usage by process
great for checking freshly written code for memory leaks!
wc -l count lines in file or text stream
great for checking that an output data file has the expected length
xargs build commands to execute from standard input
can be used with ls to, e.g., run a script on each of a subset of files in a directory