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What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands? (piefed.social)
submitted 4 months ago by marighost@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I've been setting up a new Proxmox server and messing around with VMs, and wanted to know what kind of useful commands I'm missing out on. Bonus points for a little explainer.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot. It pipes Journalctl (boot logs) into grep to find 'foo', and prints 10 lines before and after each instance of 'foo'.

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[-] GaryGhost@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

ps -ef | grep <process_name

Kill -9 proces id

I googled that -15 is better, I forgot what -9 even did, been using it for years.

[-] black0ut@pawb.social 4 points 4 months ago

The number is the signal you send to the program. There's a lot of signals you can send (not just 15 and 9).

The difference between them is that 15 (called SIGTERM) tells the program to terminate by itself (so it can store its cached data, create a save without losing data or corrupting, drop all its open connections gracefully, etc). 9 (called SYGKILL) will forcefully kill a program, without waiting for it to properly close.

You normally should send signal 15 to a program, to tell it to stop. If the program is frozen and it's not responding or stopping, you then send signal 9 and forcefully kill it. No signal is "better" than the other, they just have different usecases.

[-] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago

Maybe I interest you in pgrep? pkill? killall?

[-] GaryGhost@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Those are nice too.

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
166 points (98.3% liked)

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