Data scientists usually develop on Linux machines with a desktop environment, a graphical file manager and an IDE installed. However, in many situations the terminal commands are more efficient and effective or it could happen that the graphical interface is not available: for instance, when using SSH to connect to a remote machine or when using Colab GPU instance through SSH.

In this article, we are going to list the most useful Linux console commands for a data scientist. The list is far from complete, but it is a good starting point! We divided the list into three parts: file management, system monitoring and text file manipulation.

Before starting, some basics in Linux command line:

• Almost every Linux command has the option –help which provides a quick overview of its functionality.
• You can use CTRL+C and CTRL+Z to stop any command that is working.
• With history command, you can get the list of past commands.
• If you want to get a clean window, just use clear.
• When typing a long file/folder name, you can press TAB to autocomplete!
• You can run multiple commands by separating them with “;” or with “&&”. If “&&” is used, then commad on the right will be executed only if the command on the left is successful.

#command-line #linux #terminal