Linux Terminal - System Information

This page is a part of the Linux and CS Systems Bootcamp. This page assumes you have your computer setup to connect to the CS server, or have the appropriate software installed on your computer to run commands. Go back to the Linux and CS Systems Bootcamp main page if you don't have our system setup yet.

Commands

The following are some commands to print information about the system.

• uptime - how long since last system reboot
• df - information about disk free space
• whoami - which user is currently logged in on the terminal
• hostname - what computer are you currently running commands on
• pwd - which directory are you inside of
• clear - clear the terminal screen
• finger - see which other users are currently logged in
• man - help about a command (manual). While using man - use q key to quit, and up/down arrows to scroll.

Sample Session

Here is an example session from running on the CS server using all of these commands. Note that the part "cs299@cs:~> " is a prompt that is printed by the terminal, and the part after this is what was typed by the user. So for the first command, the user typed the command uptime and then pressed enter. The system then printed some information on the next line, and then printed the prompt "cs299@cs:~> " again to indicate it is ready for the next command. The prompt displays "cs299" because that is the user that was logged in running these commands. If your username was "cs15115" then your prompt would be something like "cs15115@cs:~>".

You should login to one of the CS systems, open up the terminal, and try out these commands as well. If you get an error, check that you are typing the commands exactly as they are given here.
[video demo]

cs299@cs:~> uptime
 09:00:45 up 56 days, 19:35,  3 users,  load average: 0.32, 0.31, 0.32
cs299@cs:~> df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root      1016G  229G  778G  23% /
devtmpfs        498G     0  498G   0% /dev
tmpfs            32M  2.3M   30M   8% /run
tmpfs           498G  8.0K  498G   1% /dev/shm
cgroup_root     8.0M     0  8.0M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2       127G   22G  105G  17% /usr
/dev/sda3       127G  8.3G  118G   7% /var
/dev/sda4        64G   13G   51G  20% /tmp
/dev/sda5        10T  2.8T  7.2T  28% /u1
/dev/sda6       4.0T  685G  3.3T  18% /net
/dev/sda7        18T  6.9T   11T  40% /store
cs299@cs:~> whoami
cs299
cs299@cs:~> hostname
cs.indstate.edu
cs299@cs:~> pwd
/u1/class/cs299
cs299@cs:~> man pwd