37 Insane Linux Commands You Need to Know in 2025

[00:02] killer. And it can even show you icons. Look at that. I'm using my mouse right now. Such a cool tool. This thing is kind of magic. How amazing is that? It's powerful. I mean, look at that. That's a superpower. 37 Linux commands. You will

[00:16] not believe the last few. Let's go. NCDU. Find out what's taking up so much space on your hard drive. It's like DF and DU, but better because it's visual and interactive. Woohoo. I can delete stuff right here.

[00:29] and even drill down into folders. Duff, the prettier version of DF. It shows you drive usage, but it just looks nicer. RIP Grap GP, but with coffee. Powered by Rust. It can do things like quickly finding errors in

[00:44] your logs. Look how fast that was. Find all your Python functions. That's so nuts. Or files that mention an API key. Seriously, it just makes Gre cry. Now, use Mosh to connect to your remote servers. Why? It's like SSH, but it

[01:00] supports roaming. Lose your connection, go from Wi-Fi to cellular. It keeps you That's killer. So, we'll jump into my remote server at Hostinger, the sponsor of this video. I forgot my password. This is embarrassing. Thankfully, I can

[01:14] management console, change my password. up, it doesn't work cuz I'll need mosh maintains that connection. Thankfully, I can log into Hostinger in my browser

[01:26] terminal. Get that installed and let's try it again. Boom. So, as long as you connection maintained. Now, while we're sitting here in my Hostinger VPS, let me show you another command. This is lshw. This will show me everything I need to

[01:39] know about the hardware resources in my system. I mean, it shows you everything. But if you want to find out just about the CPU, we can do this. LHW do a tick the CPU, we can do this. LHW do a tick C. Let's say CPU, just the CPU info. AMD

[01:51] epic. We can do the same thing for memory network discs. And by the way, you do get those specs for $6.99 a month. It's a whole home lab in the cloud. Host some

[02:03] practice some Linux commands, and if you use my code network chuck, the price Picture this. Ping and trace route have a baby. That's MTR. And that was weird. This tracks latency and packet loss hop by hop live. It's amazing. FD. It's like

[02:20] find, but it has less letters. Also, it's better. Better default settings insensitive, ignores hidden files and directories, and it has colorized output by default, and it's often faster. FCF or FuzzyFinder, interactive filtering of

[02:34] any list or pipe. We can look through our history, pipe it into FCF, and we powerful when you chain commands together. Doing something crazy like this, so I can easily kill a running process.

[02:47] Ranger is like a gooey file manager, but it's in the terminal. It has some Vim goodness, bulk renames, previews. That's kind of awesome. I don't use CD anymore. I use Z Oxide. It's like CD, but it's more forgiving. It will look at frequent

[02:59] and recently used directories and rank them. Check this out. I'm in the root right now. Normally, I'd have to type in tilda for my home directory to get to downloads. But no, Z has learned me. I can simply type in downloads, and it

[03:11] takes me right there. If I type in ZI and hit enter, it'll actually use FCF to give me a selection of my directories interactive. I don't use ls anymore either. I use Exa. It's got better color coding, tree view built in, and it can

[03:24] even show you icons. Look at that. Glances is your all-in-one stat dashboard. It shows you pretty much everything from a glance. And it has a ton of options. You can run it as a web server, which I could not

[03:36] But it does run an API, so you can monitor your stuff remotely. IO top. See show you a top style list of the processes using the most dis IO. And it's updating in real time. If you want to know every single little detail about

[03:50] a file, look no further than stat often built into your operating system. We'll type it in, look for a file, and it tells you everything from the day it was born. I know number. And if we do -f, it'll show us file system specific

[04:03] information like the ID. Definitely one of the nerdier commands, but still timeline view of exactly what you want to see. CPU, RAM, disk, network, memory. Run it by itself or add some options like top CPU. This combines aspects of

[04:18] VM stat, IO stat, I have stat, and net stat kind of all in one. I use the watch command all the time. It reruns any command every so many seconds you set. second for the

[04:31] Nvidia-smi command, and I can monitor my GPU cuz it's executing that command every half a second. Progress is a powerful command. Watch this. Type it in here. And right now it's showing me the progress of a secure copy happening in

[04:43] one of my T-Mug sessions. See, there it is right here. And I can actually type this in on the other side. Although it's kind of weird on the metrics. It can commands. Progress can also monitor multiple commands at once. Now, we used

[04:56] to use dig for DNS lookups. That's kind of messy. Dog is better. I mean, look at that. It's got some nice colors. Can do DNS over TLS. Although NASA wouldn't let me. You can output it in JSON. It's powerful. Now, you may have heard of TCP

[05:11] dump or even T-shark, but you know what's better? Term Shark. It's essentially a terminal user interface for T-shark. I mean, look how fun this is. I'm using my mouse right now. That's awesome. Let's filter by

[05:25] DNS. Oh my gosh. Is hostinger using Proxmox? Ah, this is fun to see. Let's keep that pcap. We can actually load in that pcap again. and examine

[05:37] it. Such a cool tool. This one might feel basic, but it's very fun. LSOF dash I. And then let's specify a port. Let's say port 22. This will show us the process that owns that port or the one that's using it. Let's check out

[05:52] port 80. Docker is using that one. There's something I've learned 40 times Subnetting. Thankfully, there's a command line tool for that. It's called command line tool for that. It's called IP calc. It's a quick subnet calculator

[06:05] that'll spit out ranges, mask, wildcard info just from using cider. Check this info just from using cider. Check this out. Let's do IP calc for 10.7.8 94 slash. Let's do a weird one. 18. All the info right there. Wormhole

[06:20] peer-to-peer end toend encrypted file transfer. This thing is kind of magic. With one command, I'll start to send my file, put it through a wormhole. It spits out this command. And over here in my hosting or VPS, I input that command

[06:32] in and start to receive. How amazing is that? Oh, by the way, that can be dealing with a firewall. Why is your system starting up so slow? What's figure it out right now. Sorry, that was a lot of energy. With the

[06:48] systemdanalyze command and then add blame at the end, showing you which services take the longest on the last boot up. We can also do critical chain dependencies helping us to understand the bottlenecks caused by sequential

[07:03] initialization. PS I'm not using ps anymore. That was lame. I'm using proxs. It's a prettier, more friendly version of psux. I can sort by CPU. View a tree. Way better than ps. Lazy Docker is

[07:18] a treasure. Check this out. One command. We get an interactive terminal user everything. It's probably my new favorite tool. I love RS sync for file transfers. It's smart, delta only, so it only syncs the differences. It can

[07:33] resume broken transfers and mirrors over SSH. Definitely the best way to copy directories or large files. Did you know that RM doesn't actually remove a file? It just unlinks it from the file system, but it's still there until it gets

[07:46] you'll want to use shred. Shred overwrites a file multiple passes before it deletes, thwarting data recovery. More utils gives us more utils, like this. Use the TS command to add timestamps to anything you're doing. Use

[08:00] error no to find out what error numbers mean. Use if data to look at your network interfaces more simply. You get much cleaner output. Use vidir to edit editor, which seems very dangerous. I'm scared. VIP allows you to insert your

[08:15] command pipeline and edit the data that is being piped between UNP will unpack any archive. I wish I would have found this one way earlier.

[08:29] fun. It actually guesses based on the archive type what the command should be. JQ is the JSON lightsaber. It will query and transform JSON output. I can do amazing oneliners using jq to grab exactly what I want to see. Getting

[08:43] pretty crazy with my output. Task Warrior is task management from the CLI. You really never have to leave. Check this out. We can add a task. List our this out. We can add a task. List our tasks. How cool is that? Mark task

[08:55] done. It told me I have more urgent tasks. I kind of love this. I actually might start using this. Hands down the most amazing command on this list. Ask Cinema or Ask Cinema. You can record your terminal sessions into small

[09:08] your terminal sessions into small textbased cast files. Watch this. textbased cast files. Watch this. I'm

[09:25] stuff. Hit control D to finish. Save it locally and we can play it back. Look at actually in the terminal. You can pause it with the spacebar. Go in here and that's so fun. You can self-host a server that you can upload these

[09:39] command you can use with Aski Cinema. Ask Cinema a another tool they make will convert your command line video into a GIF or a GIF. I'm not sure how to say it anymore. That is amazing. I'm just thinking like when I want to show

[09:53] command line, just make a quick GIF. GIF, send it to them. Fabric. If you're to interact with AI. I've shown it before, but check this out. Combine it with the commands we already know. For example, I might pipe in my history and

[10:08] commands. Look at that. That's a some recommendations, use it to analyze your SIS log. And this I'm still exploring, but the possibilities are endless. Use AI or

[10:21] things like Olama to help you craft commands on the fly. I'm a big fan of Olama because you can run it here locally. Check this out. I'll create a custom Olama agent. Its only job is to help me create commands on the fly. And

[10:33] then I simply run the model and say things like create a command that will find out what is taking up all of my disc space. Look how fast that was. Or

[10:45] tell it to build an inmount command. It's amazing. Which command was miss something cool? Let us know. Share the community. And by the way, have you sure you do hit that like button, subscribe, comment, cuz you got to hack

[11:01] subscribe, comment, cuz you got to hack YouTube today. Ethically, of course.