Handy Linux Commands for Amazon EC2

When you want to quickly configure a Linux-based Amazon EC2 instance.

Linux comes in so many flavors that beginners and intermediate users alike are constantly learning new things. No wonder there are thousands of blogs and articles, and even full websites dedicated to tracking this vast landscape and ever-evolving variants.

What would help is a set of universal Linux commands that you can make part of your standard repertoire to help you quickly home in on the vitals of the specific instance at hand.

Here are a few that always come in handy.

Determine the Linux Distribution & Version

cat /etc/os-release

$ cat /etc/os-release 
NAME="Amazon Linux"
VERSION="2"
ID="amzn"
ID_LIKE="centos rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="2"
PRETTY_NAME="Amazon Linux 2"
ANSI_COLOR="0;33"
CPE_NAME="cpe:2.3:o:amazon:amazon_linux:2"
HOME_URL="https://amazonlinux.com/"

This will help you quickly determine which package manager you can use to install or upgrade packages.

Linux Distribution	Linux Package Manager
REHL	Yum
Ubuntu / Debian	Apt
Arch	Pacman
Gentoo	Portage
Zyper	Open Suse

Determining the Architecture

uname -a

uname -m

$ uname -a
Linux ip-172-31-119-209.ap-south-1.compute.internal 5.10.157-139.675.amzn2.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Dec 8 01:29:11 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ uname -m
x86_64

This example above confirms that we are running on x86 64-bit architecture.

Another command that gives us information about the machine including the kernel and architecture is

hostnamectl

$ hostnamectl
   Static hostname: ip-172-31-119-209.ap-south-1.compute.internal
         Icon name: computer-vm
           Chassis: vm
        Machine ID: ec27d6ed5bca7925c09eebd91d3d3675
           Boot ID: 06d31d10f8c54e9ab5f8d927408dbcbf
    Virtualization: amazon
  Operating System: Amazon Linux 2
       CPE OS Name: cpe:2.3:o:amazon:amazon_linux:2
            Kernel: Linux 5.10.157-139.675.amzn2.x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64