Commandline complete list of commands

Question

Is there a way/command to get a listing of all the commands available on my system from the commandline prompt?

Answer 1

Usually pressing tab once or twice will display a message such as:

Display all 435 possibilities? (y or n)

Pressing Y will display all commands you can run that are on your default path.

Answer 2

If you want to display all commands available in your $PATH, you may use this command:

ls $(echo $PATH | tr ":" " ")

If you want to display all executable files available on your filesystem, you may use this command (beware, it might take some time):

find / -type f \( -perm -u=x -o -perm -g=x -o -perm -o=x \) 2>/dev/null

The files listed by this command are not necessarily commands, they are just set as executable.

(you might need to run it as root if you want to search, remove the 2> /dev/null part to know where the find command did not search as a normal user)

You may also want to list your aliases, to do so , you can use this command:

alias

Answer 3

In bash, you can use compgen -c to get all command completions generated to stdout (so you can use grep, etc. instead of just paging through the list). You can also add a prefix:

$ compgen -c ls
ls
lsbom
lsbom
lsdiff
lsof
lsvfs
lsvfs

$ compgen -c | grep zcat
bzcat
bzcat
bzcat
gzcat
gzcat
lzcat
zcat
zcat

$ compgen -c | sort -u | grep zcat
bzcat
gzcat
lzcat
zcat

Answer 4

Not that I know of, but you could either ls /usr/bin or ls /usr/sbin or list all the mans ls /usr/share/man/man1

Answer 5

All the products installed in your system can be executed from the command-line.

However, some built-in commands are available that are specific to the shell that you use.

Here are pointers to documentation about some most used shells : bash, Bourne shell (sh), C shell (csh).

For some shells the built-in help command displays helpful information about the built-in commands.

Answer 6

On a slightly different note:

Many linux systems have man installed.

man -k searchword will list all commands (which have manual files) which have searchword in their description, a little more in-depth and comprehensive (man cmdname will then list the manual for cmdname).