Essential Shell Commands

Focus Area: Command Line Fluency

🎯 Context & Objective

Getting really comfortable with the shell commands I’ll use constantly in DevOps work. Building a reference guide I can come back to whenever I need it.

✅ Work Recap & Achievements

Command Documentation: Put together a guide covering 60 important bash commands with examples focused on DevOps scenarios.

Practice Time: Actually spent time using these commands instead of just reading about them. Working on building muscle memory for the ones I’ll need most.

Real-World Context: Connected each command to actual DevOps tasks—log analysis, process monitoring, file manipulation, system checks.

What I made:

60 Greatest Bash Commands - my reference guide
Practice notes with useful command combinations
Better typing speed for common commands

🧗 Challenges & Struggles

Too Much Info: With so many flags and options, it’s easy to try learning everything at once. Had to focus on what’s actually useful first.

Different Distros: Some commands work differently depending on the Linux distribution. Had to look up compatibility issues.

📚 Key Learnings & Progress

What I learned:

Text processing with sed, awk, and grep for analyzing logs
Process management using ps, top, htop, and kill
File system navigation with find, locate, and ls
Network troubleshooting with netstat, ss, and lsof

Key Takeaway: Time spent getting fast with the command line now saves a lot of headache later when managing multiple servers and containers.

⏭️ Next Steps & Closing Thoughts

This was good, focused practice. Command-line speed matters more than people think—it’s one of those things that shows experience.

Writing the documentation helped me learn. Explaining what each command does made it stick better.

Next: setting up my Mac with all the DevOps tools—Docker, Kubernetes, cloud CLIs, etc. Better to get everything configured now than deal with installation issues while trying to learn. 🛠️