🧠Expand Your Linux Skills with These 5 Advanced Commands and Examples🖥️🐧

Mastering these Linux commands can make you feel like a real power user 💪. Let’s explore top 5 advanced commands, what they do, and how they help in real-world situations.

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1. 🔍 strace – Trace System Calls and Signals

📦 What it does:
strace helps you see what a program is doing in the background, like reading files, writing data, or making system calls.

🛠️ Real-life Example:
Your program is crashing, and you don’t know why. Use strace to trace what’s going on behind the scenes.

strace ./my_app

📌 You’ll find out:

• Which files are opened

• Missing libraries

• Permission errors

🚀 Pro Tip:
Want to trace a running process?

strace -p 1234

Where 1234 is your process ID (PID).

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2. 🧪 lsof – List Open Files

📦 What it does:
Shows all open files by processes. In Linux, everything is a file — ports, devices, logs!

🛠️ Real-life Example:
You can’t start your server on port 8080. Something is already using it?

lsof -i :8080

📌 You’ll find out:

• Which process is using that port

• The PID so you can kill it

• Whether the port is TCP/UDP

🚀 Pro Tip:
Find open files in a folder:

lsof +D /var/log

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3. 📊 htop – Interactive Process Viewer

📦 What it does:
An advanced, colorful and interactive version of top. Monitor system performance and manage processes in real-time.

🛠️ Real-life Example:
Your server is slow. Use htop to quickly check which process is eating all the CPU or RAM.

htop

📌 You can:

• Sort processes by memory, CPU

• Kill tasks with one key

• Monitor load, uptime, cores

🚀 Pro Tip:
Use arrow keys to navigate, F9 to kill a process.

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4. 🧬 awk – Pattern Scanning & Text Processing

📦 What it does:
awk is like a mini-programming language for manipulating text — great for log files and reports.

🛠️ Real-life Example:
You want to analyze Apache logs and get a list of all IPs.

awk '{print $1}' access.log

📌 You can also:

• Do calculations: awk '{sum+=$2} END {print sum}' file.txt

• Filter text: awk '$3 > 100' file.txt

🚀 Pro Tip:
Combine with ps to extract useful data:

ps aux | awk '{print $1, $3, $11}'

Shows: user, CPU usage, and command.

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5. 🛡️ iptables – Manage Firewall Rules

📦 What it does:
Controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic using rules.

🛠️ Real-life Example:
You want to allow SSH (port 22) but block everything else.

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -P INPUT DROP

📌 You’ll be able to:

• Open/close ports

• Block IPs

• Protect your server

🚀 Pro Tip:
Check all rules with:

sudo iptables -L

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✅ Summary Table

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🏁 Conclusion

Learning and using these advanced Linux commands can supercharge your productivity, help you troubleshoot faster, and give you greater control over your system. Whether you’re managing a live server, analyzing logs, or debugging a stubborn error — these tools are must-haves in your Linux toolbox. 🧰🐧

✨ Keep practicing and try combining commands in shell scripts to automate your tasks. The more you explore, the more powerful Linux becomes! 💻🚀

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