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.
ncdu
Most listed in some form elsewhere, but
- Ugrep
- ranger/lf
- tmux (splitting terminal and detatching/reattaching when I’m sshing onto server, etc)
I’ve also been enjoying Kate. It’s a decent text editor, but the ability to Ctrl + / to pipe selected lines through any Linux command (Uniq, shuf, etc) is a bit of a superpower for an editor
I’m a big fan of
screen
because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.I do a lot of work on customers’ servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.
I’d recommend
tmux
for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”
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)
Do you have experience with either ranger, lf, or yazi? I’m wondering how broot compares. Big fan of file ranger, and this looks very similar.
grep goes crazy if you know your regex
I love flexibility with regex, personally I use ugrep as it also allows utilization of boolean and/or/not logic for more complicated searches.
I was expecting this one.
pdfgrep for the well maintained company’s project folder of your choice.
pipeviewer or
pv
jq?
Man
dude
Bruh
zoxide. It’s a fabulous
cd
replacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you’ve navigated to a directory, instead of having to typecd /super/long/directory/path
, you can typezoxide path
and it’ll take you right to/super/long/directory/path
.I have it aliased to
zd
. I love it and install it on every systemYou can do things like using a partial directory name and it’ll jump you to the closest match in the database. So
zoxide pa
would take you to/super/long/directory/path
.And you can do partial paths. Say you’ve got two directories named
data
in your filesystem.One at
/super/long/directory/path1/data
And the other at
/super/long/directory/path2/data
You can do
zoxide path2 data
and you’ll go to/super/long/directory/path2/data
Not powerful, but often useful,
column -t
aligns 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 ccc888
Discovered about rg recently and it is cool!
Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can
cp -g
to see progress. Set an alias :)Where can this variant of coreutils be found? This is the first time I have heard of it.
vd
(VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.
I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.
socat
- connect anything to anythingfor example
socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345
socat tcp-listen:12345 -
socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345