Executing commands inside a container

From the output, we can see that the container status is UP. Now we can execute some commands inside the container using the docker exec command with different options:

$ docker exec -i 00f343906df3 ls -l /
total 12
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Feb 15 04:18 bin
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Nov 19 15:32 boot
drwxr-xr-x. 5 root root 360 Mar 6 21:17 dev
drwxr-xr-x. 42 root root 4096 Mar 6 21:17 etc
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Nov 19 15:32 home
...
Output truncated for brevity
...

Option -i (--interactive) allows you to run a Docker without dropping inside the container. But we can easily override this behavior and enter this container by using -i and -t (--tty) options (or just -it):

$ docker exec -it 00f343906df3 /bin/bash
root@00f343906df3:/usr/local/apache2#

We should fall into container bash CLI. From here, we can execute other general Linux commands. This trick is very useful for troubleshooting. To exit the container console, just type exit or press Ctrl + D.