Tech
12 Useful Crosh Chrome OS Commands to Run on Your Chromebook

Google’s Chrome OS might merely appear to be a more convenient operation system aimed at people seeking to navigate through Chrome its app environment more easily, but there is more to it than meets the eye. For Chromebook users, being able to run basic Crosh Chrome OS commands could significantly improve one’s personal device efficiency and productivity. As these Crosh Chrome OS commands although basic on the surface can allow for greater fine-tuning of one’s device than with any standard control settings.
What is Crosh?
Whereas Windows has Command Prompt and Mac has Terminal, Chromebook uses a built-in Command Shell environment called Crosh Chrome OS, also commonly referred to as Chrome Shell. The terminal gives users access to a command-line interface that lets them test, debug, or just play around with their system.
Even without enabling developer mode, Crosh Chrome OS users can run several terminal commands directly from their device. These commands include connecting to SSH servers, monitoring resource usage, troubleshooting network issues, adjusting private hardware settings, performing hardware tests, and numerous other debugging purposes.
Let’s examine some of these commands Chromebook users should be familiar with to help increase their productivity and troubleshooting.
Opening Crosh Chrome OS
To initialize Crosh Chrome Os, press Ctrl + Alt + T anywhere on the Chrome OS, which would open the Crosh prompt as a new browser tab.
Basic Help Commands
1. From here, you can run ‘help’ to view a list of general commands or ‘help_advanced’ for more advanced ones mainly used for debugging
2. To perform a ping test on your Chromebook, type ‘ping’ such as ping google.com to verify your network connection. Ping testing is ultimately a crucial technique for identifying network problems that inform you about the speediness of your Internet traffic.
3. In case you are unaware, Google provides a Secure Shell (SSH) client in the Chrome Web Store. You can initiate an SSH network connection using the ‘ssh’ command. You can also create local proxies to transfer your activities on your Chrome OS over to your SSH connection. In addition, the client also allows you to add users, host, and port as arguments to the server.
4. But whenever you wish to discard a host from a list of known hosts you’ve connected to with the SSH command, you can simply use the command ‘ssh_forget_host’ to remove it.
5. Similar to Windows and Mac, Chrome also comes with a task manager that allows you to see which Chrome tabs, extensions, and plug-ins are consuming your OS resources. The ‘top’ command helps to open this task manager and show all the processes running on your Chromebook.
6. Finally, the ‘exit’ command enables you to close down Crosh.
Advanced Help Commands
7. Although you can see data of your Chromebook’s memory via third-party plugins, you can also run the command ‘memory_test’ to perform diagnoses on the free RAM currently available on your ChromeOS for a more detailed breakdown of your memory information.
8. If you wish to adjust your mouse’s speed, one option is to modify them on the Chromebook’s menu settings. However, by running ‘xset m’ on the command prompt, Crosh would give you more granular control of your mouse’s acceleration rate than the primary speed adjustment on the menu setting. This command is particularly useful for those using an external mouse that might not conform to Chromebook’s default settings.
9. Similarly, the ‘xset r’ command allows you to adjust the autorepeat behavior or the speed at which the letter repeats itself on the screen when you hold down a key on your keyboard. You can control how the repeats rate per second and how long it takes for the autorepeat to begin when you first push the button. You can also completely turn off the function altogether or restrict it to only a few keys.
10. Even though you can already see your battery data by clicking on the bottom right-hand corner of your Chromebook’s screen, you can also run the command battery_test in Crosh to see even more information. In addition to providing feedback on the general well-being and remaining battery life of your Chromebook, Crosh can also show you exactly how much battery power your device consumes within a specified amount of time.
11. You can also customize your Chromebook’s touchpad with the ‘tpcontrol’ command. Although the standard Chrome OS settings window already offers some of these options, you can adjust a lot of other settings that aren’t accessible through the graphical user interface.
12. Meanwhile, the ‘tracepath’ command lets you see the route that your computer’s data packets used to travel to a distant server. It’s a helpful network troubleshooting command that enables you to pinpoint the precise location of network issues between your devices and others.
Developer Commands
Adđitionally, some other commands you to have Developer Mode enabled for usage, a few of these commands include:
- shell: opens a full bash shell with commands exclusively for developers.
- rlz: enable or disable RLZ, an encoded string consisting of identifying information about the source from which Chrome was downloaded and the week of installation
- systrace: Initiates a system trace.
- packet_capture: captures and logs data packets while troubleshooting network connections.
- upload_crashes: upload available crash reports to the Chrome crash servers
- syslog: store a message to a standard message logging.