20 Terminal Commands That Every Developer Should Know

Terminal commands to know for your better workflow and efficiency

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If you are a developer, then there is a high chance that you would be working on a server running on a Linux-based operating system. And you would need to work with commands as part of your regular work. Here you will go through a list of different terminal commands that would be very helpful in your development work.

1. pwd

pwd (present working directory) returns your current location on the file system.

/Users/Shared/bash$ pwd
/Users/Shared/bash

2. ls

ls lets you list the contents of the current directory

/Users/Shared/bash$ ls
hello.txt sample

Many flags can be used along with the ls but the most commonly used one is -l, which gives you a longer more informative version of the list.

3. cd

cd (change directory) allows you to navigate from the current location.

If you know the name or path of the directory from your current location you can navigate to that like shown below.

/Users/Shared/bash$ cd sample
/Users/Shared/bash/sample$

If you want to navigate back then you can use .., you can also go back multiple levels using multiple double dots separated by a / for each level.

/Users/Shared/bash/sample$ cd ..
/Users/Shared/bash$

You can directly go to a directory by giving its location from the root level of the file system by including a / at the beginning of the path like shown.

/Users/Shared/bash$ cd /Users
/Users$

4. chmod

chmod (change mode and accessibility) allows you to modify the permissions to the provided files and directories.

There are two modes in which you can modify the permissions absolute and symbolic.

Absolute mode is represented by an octal number for each owner, group, and other users. The below table will give you an idea of which actual number you can use to provide what permissions.