Dedicated Server School

A Linux dedicated server is all about commands. At some point, you will inevitably need to manage it from SSH (Secure Shell), which means you will be presented with a command line interface. While you may already know some commands, it is nice to see what the server offers as a whole. You can do that with the compgen command. It gives you a list of commands of a certain type or of all commands in general.

From the shell prompt, simply type:

compgen -C

The output will look something like this:

ntfscmp

setupcon

dmesg

nc.openbsd

lesskey

zfgrep

date

mountpoint

uname

zgrep

chgrp

nano

setfacl

These will be commands available to you.

To see the total number of commands that you can run, type the following:

compgen -c | wc -l

echo “$USER user can run $(compgen -c | wc -l) commands on $HOSTNAME.”

The output would look like this:

tavis user can run 3400 commands on serverschool

Compgen has some other options as well.

• compgen -a lists all bash aliases available to you
• compgen b shows all bash built-ins
• compgen -k shows all the bash keywords
• compgen -A shows all the bash functions

For more information about compgen, you can read the documentation online.

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