Good job on reaching the end of this lesson! You are now well-equipped or at least aware of the number of utilities available in the Linux shell. To review, we talked about:

Documentation

Documentation is a great way to learn about installed utilities.

• The /usr/share/doc/ directory contains README files and other documents for installed commands.
• man is a command to access reference manual pages for all installed commands. Usage: man <command_name>.
• infois a command to access full-detailed information pages for all installed commands. Usage info <command_name>.

Compression

Compression reduces file sizes. Three popular compression commands are gzip, bzip2, and xz. To compress, run commands like so: <compression_utility> [options] <file_name>. To decompress, include the -d option: <compression_utility> -d <compressed_file_name>. gzip also supports the -r option to compress all files in a directory.

Archive

zip and tar are two archiving utilities that package multiple files into a single archive file. zip: archives and compresses files.

• Archive: zip <archive_name>.zip <file1> <file2>... Use -r option for directories.
• Extract: unzip <archive_name>.zip.

tar: only archives files by default but has options to utilize compression utilities. Unlike zip, it preserves Unix file attributes like file permissions.

• Archive: tar -cf <archive_name>.tar <files or directory>.
• Extract: tar -xf <archive_name>.tar.
• Add options -z, -j, or -J to compress via gzip, bzip2, or xz respectively.

Networking

Basic network commands:

• curl or wget: Interacts with a webpage or file hosted online.
• ping <target domain or IP>: Checks connectivity between two devices on the same network.
• host <domain or IP>: Performs DNS lookups.
• ifconfig: Shows network interface information.

Feel free to practice in the terminal!