Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I’m surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
socat- connect anything to anythingfor example
socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345socat tcp-listen:12345 -socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts
I love jq, but I wouldn’t call it “surprising simple” for anything but pretty-formatting json. It has a fairly steep learning curve for doing anything with all but the simplest operations on the simplest data structures.
It’s not even pretty or accessible. 2-spaced indentation is incredibly hard to read.
It can also format minimized JSON from cURL API requests
jqandyqare both things I install on pretty much every machine I have.Combine with jc to process CSV files. This is how I get data into my plain text accounting system.
I think a lot of people don’t realise that yt-dlp works for many sites, not just YouTube
I used it recently for watching a video from tiktok without having to use their god awful web UI and it was amazing
It also supports ripping playlists. Fantastic to archive a set locally…
The huge list of sites can be found here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/tree/master/yt_dlp/extractor
Since everyone keeps mentioning yt-dlp I gotta ask: what’s wrong with the original youtube-dl? I keep using it, it works, it’s still being updated.
yt-dlp has sponsorblock features, youtube-dl does not.
bcIt’s a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.
Very useful for shell scripts that need to do maths as well. I use it to make percentages when stdout has values between 0.0 and 1.0
I once wrote a bc script that calculated parameters for the Blackman window for a FIR filter. (Had formulas already so not that impressive) Upped the precision until it needed like 30 sec to calculate, completely unnecessarely :).
losetupit’s useful for dealing with virtual disk images. like a real physical hard disk, but it’s a file on the computer. you can mount it, format it, and write it to a real physical disk.
it’s sometimes used with virtual machines, with iso images, or when preparing a bootable disk.
xargs
Very true. I used to do magic with xargs when working as a sysadm. Also a good way to mess up on a grand scale. Ask me how I know.
So, how do you know?
By not testing it properly before running it over the whole file system resulting in a few hours of extra work cleaning up the mess I made.
nmap *your_local_ip_address*for example
nmap 192.168.1.43/24will show you what devices are connected to the local network, and what ports are open there. really useful, for example, when you forgot the address of your printer or raspi yet again.you can also use it to understand what ports on your computer are open from an attacker’s perspective, or simply to figure out what services are running (ssh service).
A few that I use every day:
- Fish shell
- Starship.rs
- Broot (a brilliant filesystem navigator)
- Helix editor (My favorite editor / IDE, truly the successor to vim IMO)
- Topgrade (updates everything)
I heard about helix from you and I’ve used it for a year and a half or so now, it’s by far the best editor I’ve used so far and I can definitely vouch for it
Nice!
Just commenting to give more love to helix. It’s my favorite “small quick edits” editor.
Could you explain them in more depth? I opened them and don’t know
Helix is a terminal based text editor. It’s much like vim / neovim, but unlike those editors it’s good to go right out of the box, no configuration or plugins needed to make it work well.
Topgrade is one I haven’t used, but it looks like its intended purpose is to let you upgrade your apps with one command, even if you use multiple different package managers (I.e. if you were on Ubuntu, you could use it to upgrade your apt packages, at the same time as your snap packages, as well as flatpak, nix, and homebrew if you’ve added those.)
Thank you for explaining. I would never have understood topgrade without your example :)
Once Helix gets plugin support and someone makes a Clojure REPL plugin as good as Conjure I am never touching
vimagain!It does have clojure lsp support, but you’ll probably have to use a command line for most repls.
Yeah the clojure lsp support is top notch, but there being no support for “jacking in” to a repl is the big thing keeping me from using helix full time. There’s a way of doing it if you use kitty, but it’s pretty janky.
I’ve actually been testing with fish recently coming from zsh, though I might wait until 4.0 fully releases before I make a more conclusive decision to move or not.
With that said, I remember looking through omf themes and stumbled onto Starship that branched off one of the themes and really liked the concept.
One thing that holds people back sometimes is that bash scripts that set environment variables don’t work by default. https://github.com/edc/bass is an easy solution
Helix is great thanks
yesThe most positive command you’ll ever use.
Run it normally and it just spams ‘y’ from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with ‘y’. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that’s what this is for.
Also, you can make
yesreturn anything:yes noI… did not know that. Thanks, TIL!
What’s the syntax here? Do I go
command && yes
I’m not sure if I’ve had a use case for it, but it’s interesting.
truedelivers error level 0,falseerror level 1.yes && echo True || echo Falsewill always be True.false && echo True || echo Falsewill always be False.Common usage is for tools that ask for permissions and similiar.
yes | cp -ihas the same effect ascp --force(-i: prompt before overwrites).Also my favourite way to push a core to 100% CPU
yes > /dev/nullhow is that better than
cat /dev/zero > /dev/nullor
while true; do :; doneWho said it was better? It’s just my favourite.
Like my favourite shirt, it’s no better than the others, but it brings me a little joy :)
- on a serious note though, thank you for sharing your two examples - I didn’t know they existed.
That will just wait for
commandto finish properly and then runyes.What you want to run is
yes | command, so it spams the command with confirmations.For some cases I use “|| true”.
The idiom accepts that the preceding command might fail, and that’s OK.
For example, a script where mkdir creates a directory that might already exist.
mkdir -pwill not complain if the dir existsRight, it was an example of a pattern. In that case, -p could be used.
I figured as much. Just wanted to show another option.
Sorry, I should have explained that. it’s
command | yesyes|command- Eg,yes|apt-get update(Not a great example since apt-get has -y, but sometimes that fails when prompting for new keys to accept)Edit: I got it backwards, thanks @lengau@midwest.social for the correction.
You’ve got it backwards - you need to pipe the output of
yesinto the input of the command:yes | command-that-asks-a-lot-of-questionsSo I did - thanks for the correction, edited.
Not powerful, but often useful,
column -taligns columns in all lines. EG$ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 a5 a10 a9999 a888 bb5 bb10 bb9999 bb888 ccc5 ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888 $ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 | column -t a5 a10 a9999 a888 bb5 bb10 bb9999 bb888 ccc5 ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.
tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility
all of them
probably well known at this point but rsync is incredible and I use it all the time
CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear
Also
Ctrl+Dto exit any shell andCtrl+Rfor reverse searching your history!
netstat -tunlshows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.netstat is kind of deprecated,
ssis more modern (from the iproute2 package) and uses very similar parameters.
