December 26, 2009 — Want to know how to run two or more linux commands sequentially? It's simple: use the semicolon ;.
For instance:
cd;ls
This will change the directory to your home directory, then list the contents. You can use as many semicolons as you wish.
Another option is to use && if you only want the next command to execute if the previous command executed successfully.
cd ~/myfiles; cp file.txt ~/backup/ && rm file.txt
This will only run the last command if the cp command executed successfully.
You can swap the && for || to run a command if the previous one fails.