AWS CLI Cheat Sheet

Useful for troubleshooting auth, SSO, and output behavior differences between versions.

Lists services, global options, and usage patterns.

Use this to discover commands, arguments, and examples for a service.

Displays the syntax, parameters, and examples for a subcommand.

Writes values to your local AWS config and credentials files.

Useful for checking which credentials, region, and profile are active.

Useful when switching among multiple accounts and environments.

Reads a setting from your shared config file for the specified profile.

Writes a value to the named profile in the shared config file.

Creates a profile that uses temporary credentials sourced from IAM Identity Center.

Starts an authentication flow and caches short-lived credentials for the profile.

One of the most useful commands for validating the currently active credentials.

Overrides any configured region for this invocation only.

Overrides the default profile for this invocation.

Useful for quick interactive inspection.

The `--query` option applies a JMESPath expression to the response.

Useful in scripts and CI environments.

Useful for testing or when you intentionally want a single page only.

Can help long-running list operations avoid timeouts while still returning the full result set.

Useful when previewing large result sets.

Helpful when crafting JSON input for complex commands.

Useful when commands have many nested parameters.

Handy for scripts that validate or enumerate regions.

Useful for subnet, EBS, and deployment planning.

Many AWS services expose service-specific tagging commands or APIs.

Waiters poll the service until a known condition is met or a timeout occurs.

Helpful for diagnosing signing, credential, region, and endpoint issues.