Basic Terminal Commands

There are many commands which are most commonly used for both the terminal and the KU Cluster. Commonly used commands are shown below; however, many more commands can be found within the KU Cluster Wiki.

Navigating Directories

Entering and leaving directories (folders) is done with the cd command. You can press TAB to quickly fill out paths to a desired directory location. For example,

• pwd shows the path to your current directory.

• ls shows all files and available directories within your current path.

• cd will return you to the root directory. For the cluster, this is your $HOME profile.

• cd path/to/file will take you to some directory. For example, cd /home/KUID/work/ will take you to your $WORK directory, where KUID is your KU Username (e.g. a123b456).

• cd .. returns to the previous directory.

Efficient Typing in the Terminal

With increased use of the terminal, speedy commands can save time and frustration. All example toggles are for Mac… Windows will have similar methods but can be found online.

• CTRL + A will reset your terminal cursor to the first character in the prompt. Useful for uploading multiple files to the cluster with different names, instead of rewriting the whole scp file_name1 ... repeatedly for a list of unique file_name1, file_name2, ....

• CMD + R will clear the current terminal screen, leaving only the prompt line.

• CMD + T will open a new terminal tab.

• CMD + D will open a new terminal tab next to the current tab. This can be really nice for quick copy-paste procedures.

• CTRL + U will clear the entire terminal prompt from whatever text may currently be typed.

Editing Files

To edit files, you can use either vi, emacs, or VSCode. It is recommended to either use vim (vi) or emacs unless you are familiar with VSCode.

Using VSCode as a visual guide when navigating the cluster can be extremely helpful. You can download files without typing the entire command, edit files with added navigation and debugging assistance, as well as quickly access files to edit. Steps to implement VSCode for ssh use can be found here.

Copying and Removing

To copy or remove files/directories, cp and rm are used.

• cp path/to/original path/to/copy will copy a file to a new path. The path to the copy is required (if you are copying to the same directory, you can simply just type the name of the new copied file instead).

• cp -R path/to/original/ path/to/copy/ will copy a directory to a new path. Similarly to the general cp command, a new location or name must be specified.

• mv path/to/file path/to/destination moves the file of interest without copying its contents.

• rm path/to/file removes a single file. This cannot be undone. Once files are removed, the action is permanent.

• rm -rf path/to/file removes a directory and its included contents.

Other Helpful Commands

• du -sh path/to/directory/ displays the amount of memory associated to a directory.

• scp KUID@login1.hpc.crc.ku.edu:path/to/file path/to/destination will download a file from the Cluster to your computer (where KUID is your KU Username). It is important to cd to the location you want the file to be downloaded to prior to downloading it from the Cluster itself.

  • scp -r KUID@login1.hpc.crc.ku.edu:path/to/file path/to/destination will download a directory and its contents (including subdirectories and their associated files).

• stat path/to/file displays information including the size, creation date, and modify date for a file.