Cheat sheet for bash and SLURM

HPC
Bash
Slurm
Quick reference cheatsheet for frequently used bash commands and SLURM commands to submit or manage jobs on a HPC
Author

Anoob Prakash

Published

August 9, 2026

Bash quick reference

Command Purpose Example
~ Your home directory cd ~
/ Filesystem root and path separator cd /scratch
pwd Print working directory pwd
ls List files and directories ls -lh results
cd Change directory cd data/raw
cd .. Move up one directory cd ..
mkdir -p Create directory/directories mkdir -p logs results
head Show the beginning of a file head -n 5 file.txt
less View a file interactively; press q to exit less file.txt
grep Search for text in a file grep "value" file.txt
wc -l Count lines wc -l file.txt
curl -L -o Download URL into a named file curl -L -o file.txt URL