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General Linux Basics

This guide is an overview of a few of the basic tasks you can perform within a Unix/Unix-Like operating system such as Linux and its various other distributions after using SSH to access your system’s terminal.

How to create users/groups
How to change permissions
Rename folders/directories/files
How to create new sudo logins
How to zip/unzip files

Basic Commands

ls – lists all files

cat – types the contents of the file specified to stdout

touch – creates an empty file

rm – removes a file

cp – copies a file

mv – moves a file

find – searches for a file

cd – change directory

mkdir – make directory

pwd – print working directory

rmdir – remove directory

vi/vim – command line text editor

exit/logout – closes the current connection/session when using SSH

How to Add a New User

Adding a new user on a Linux system is quite simple. All you need to do is use the useradd command followed by the username you wish to use. It will need to be unique and cannot be the same as a user of the same name.

useradd youruser

This will also create and populate a home directory under the name of the user (/home/yourusername/) and set permissions and ownership for the directory appropriately. It will also edit some of your files in your etc directory, adding the newly created user account (passwd, group, shadow, gshadow).

Once you’ve added the user, you’ll need to create a password for it in order to unlock it. You can use the passwd command to do this.

passwd youruser

You should then be prompted with the following, where you will need to enter your password and then retype it to confirm:

Changing password for user youruser.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Once you’ve added the new user, you can check everything has been created successfully using the cat and grep commands, specifying your /etc/passwd file.

cat /etc/passwd | grep youruser

You should be shown something along the following lines.

youruser:x:1001:1001::/home/youruser:/bin/bash

How to Add a New Group

Adding a new group is just as simple as adding a new user as shown above. You will need to use the groupadd command to create a new group under the name you wish to use.

groupadd yourgroup

To add a user to this group, you will need to use the usermod command,

usermod -a -G yourgroup youruser

To check this has been done successfully, you can use the groups command to show current user’s assigned to a specific group.

groups youruser

You should see something similar to the following:

youruser : youruser yourgroup


This confirms youruser has been added to yourgroup successfully.

Overview of Permissions

Linux uses two authorisation levels, ownership and permissions, to help provide the security required to operate safely on a multi-user operating system. There are three different sets of ownership on Linux systems; user, group and other. You also have the ability to control access to files/directories for those 3 owners using the read, write and execute permissions, as shown below.

You can see an example of what permissions will look like in your terminal by using the command ls -la in your root directory. It should be in a similar format as the one shown below.

You can see the permissions on the far left of the terminal’s output. E.g. -rw-r–r–. These letters in this format are how the system represents permissions. You can understand them using the following guideline which shows what each symbol represents.

r = read – grants the ability to read a file. Without this, contents, file type, size, ownership and permissions are unable to be viewed. If a directory has read-only permissions for your user, you’ll be able to see the names of the files, but that is all.

w = write – grants the ability to modify a file. For a directory, it will allow you to create, delete, and rename files within (only if the execute permission is also permitted).

x = execute – grants the ability to execute a file. Permits the user/operating system to run executable programs. For directories, it gives the ability to access file contents as well as meta-information as long as the read permission is also set.

= no permission – this indicates the permission in the corresponding slot is missing and not permitted.

= at the start of the permissions set, this means the permissions are for a file.
d = at the start of the permissions set, this means the permissions are for a directory.

So the above example -rw-r–r–. would mean the permissions are set for a file and the user has read and write access, the group has read only access and others have read only access as well.

How to Change Permissions

The changing of permissions on Linux systems can be performed using the chmod command, which is an abbreviation for change mode.

On Unix/Unix-like systems, permissions can also be displayed in base-8 (octal) format, which means they will be displayed and configured in a minimum of three digits (a number representing each of the user, group and other permissions), but sometimes will be shown in four. Each of these digits represents a set amount of bits assigned to each given permission.

read = 4 added onto the total bits.
write = 2 added onto the total bits.
execute = 1 added onto the total bits.

Chmod can use these to set file permissions, so you’ll need to understand the permissions in octal/numeric form as well as symbolic to be able to use the chmod command efficiently (you can also set permissions in symbolic form if you wish, but this part of the guide will only show how to perform this using chmod with the numeric form). There is a handy table below outlining what each number represents permissions wise, with the symbolic notation also represented in the third column.

    Numeric     Permission Type     Symbolic
     0     No Permissions     —
     1      Execute     –x
     2     Write     -w- 
     3     Write and Execute     -wx
     4     Read Only     r–
     5     Read and Execute     r-x
     6     Read and Write     rw-
     7     Read, Write and Execute     rwx

 

Common/recommended permissions you’ll see when it comes to websites are the following:

    Numeric     Permission Type    Symbolic
    755 (Recommended for website directories)    User: Read, Write, Execute

   Group: Read, Execute

   Other: Read, Execute                                          

      -rwxr-xr-x
    644 (Recommended for website files)    User: Read, Write

   Group: Read Only

   Other: Read Only

      -rw-r–r–
    440 (Recommended for sensitive website files such as config files)                                   User: Read Only

   Group: Read Only

   Other: No Permissions

      -r–r—–
    777 (Never recommended)    User: Read, Write, Execute

   Group: Read, Write, Execute

   Other: Read, Write, Execute

      -rwxrwxrwx                     

So now you know how permissions work and are displayed, you should be able to use the chmod command to set a file/directory’s permissions to whatever you wish.

chmod 644 yourfile.txt

Once you have done this, you can use the ls -l command to check the permissions for your file have been changed successfully.

ls -l yourfile.txt

You should see similar to below in your terminal, but with the name of your file and also your user:group being different.

Changing Ownership and Group

If you notice the user/group is incorrect for the file/directory you’re wishing to change permissions for you can easily change these using the chown (change owner) and chgrp (change group) commands.

Change Owner

chown newuser yourfile.txt

Change Owner and Group

chown newuser:newgroup yourfile.txt

Change Group (chgrp)

chgrp yourgroup yourfile.txt

Renaming Folders and Directories

The renaming of file/directories is done most easily with the mv (move) command. You’ll need to have write permissions to the directory the files are in to rename a file located there. If the file/directory is a key system one, you will require root permissions to make any changes, so you’ll need to prepend sudo.

Rename Single Files

mv yourfile0.txt yournewfilename.txt

Rename Directory

mv yourdirectory yournewdirectoryname


You can also use the rename command if you wish, but you will require previous knowledge of regex (regular expressions) and perlexpr (perl expressions) to be able to use it effectively.

How to Create a New sudo User and Login as sudo User

Granting sudo permissions to a user can be seen the same as giving the user administrator privileges to perform tasks on the operating system. This allows the user to perform tasks only the root user would otherwise be able to perform.

New sudo User

adduser newsudouser

passwd newsudouser

usermod -aG wheel newsudouser

Existing User to sudo Privileges

usermod -aG wheel youruser

Login as sudo User

su - yoursudouser

Test with sudo Privileges

sudo ls -la /root

After inputting the above commands and then inputting your sudo user’s password when prompted, the file names and permissions for the /root directory should be listed successfully if the correct privileges have been provided. The /root directory is usually only accessible to the root user, so it is a good way to test this.

How to zip/unzip Files

Zipping and unzipping files is very simple within Linux. You can just use the zip program like you can within Windows operating systems. It uses the commands zip and unzip.

Simply enter the directory that contains the files you wish to zip up.

cd /path/to/your/files

Then run the zip command specifying what name you wish to call the zip file first and then the files you wish to zip into it.

zip yourzipname yourfile0.txt yourfile1.pdf yourfile2.jpg

You should then end up with a file called yourzipname.zip containing the above files.

To unzip this, you’d just use the unzip command.

unzip yourzip.zip

If you have used a program such as tar to compress your files, you’ll need to use the appropriate command to unzip it.

tar xvf yourfile.tar

This should decompress your .tar file in the current working directory. You can check this with the pwd command.

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Last saved: 2019/11/27 at 16:03 by

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