· 3 min read

Learn Terminal & Shell Commands: 57 Flashcards from ls to Pipes, sed and awk

Master 57 terminal and shell commands with flashcards: ls, grep, chmod, kill, pipes, redirects, sed and awk, plus which cards to fix and what to add.

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Most people learn the terminal backwards: they memorize thirty commands as isolated trivia, then freeze the first time they need to chain three of them. The Terminal & Shell Commands deck (code CM7557, 57 cards) contains everything you need to avoid that trap, as long as you study it in the right order.

Study this deck: Terminal & Shell Commands

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Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not

What the 57 cards cover

You'll drill: shell, Bash, Zsh, ls, cd, pwd, mkdir, rm, cp, mv, touch, cat, less, head, tail, grep, find, chmod, chown, ps, top, kill, sudo, man, echo, which, whereis, df, du, tar, gzip, unzip, wget, curl, ssh, scp, history, alias, export, env, the pipe |, redirects > >> <, background &, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+D, clear, wc, sort, uniq, diff, sed, awk, $HOME and $PATH.

FrontBack
pwdPrints the current working directory path
touchCreates an empty file or updates file timestamp
tailDisplays the last lines of a file (default 10)
chmodChanges file permissions (read, write, execute)
dfDisplays disk space usage of file systems
duDisplays disk usage of files and directories
>> (append)Redirects output to a file (appends)
Ctrl+ZSuspends the current process (can be resumed with fg)
uniqFilters out duplicate adjacent lines in a file
$PATHEnvironment variable listing directories where executables are searched

Study the operators first, not last

The deck buries its most powerful cards at positions 41-45: |, >, >>, < and &. Move them to the front of your queue. Once you know the pipe, every later command becomes a building block instead of a fact, and you can write one practice line per card:

  • ps aux | grep python (cards 20 + 16 + 41)
  • sort access.log | uniq | wc -l (cards 51 + 52 + 50)
  • du -sh * | sort -h | tail -5 (cards 29 + 51 + 15)

That middle example matters: the uniq card says adjacent duplicates, which is why it is almost always preceded by sort. Put that pairing in the hint field of card 52.

Sharpen five backs as you go

A few answers are true but too soft to survive real use. Edit them in your copy:

  1. rm deletes directories only with -r (and rmdir handles empty ones). There is no trash can.
  2. kill sends a signal to a PID, by default SIGTERM; kill -9 is the forceful SIGKILL.
  3. cat stands for concatenate: cat a.txt b.txt > both.txt is its real job.
  4. echo never writes to a file by itself; the shell's > does. That is why sudo echo x > /etc/file fails.
  5. Zsh has been the default shell on macOS since Catalina (2019), so Mac users should not assume Bash.

Also pair the look-alikes into contrast cards: df vs du, which vs whereis, wget vs curl, ssh vs scp, Ctrl+C (stop) vs Ctrl+Z (pause).

Cards worth adding

The deck stops before error handling. Write four more: 2> (redirect stderr), && (run next only on success), $? (last exit code) and jobs/fg/bg. With those, the 57 cards turn into a working toolkit.

Keep going

Once the shell feels natural, version control is the next step: our Git commands and workflows guide picks up exactly where this deck ends, and the Linux command line study guide adds 80 more Unix commands.

Find CM7557 – Terminal & Shell Commands in the library at flip-it.app and start with cards 41-45.

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