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.
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)
pdfgrep for the well maintained company’s project folder of your choice.
This looks very cool!
I really enjoy erdtree as a ls replacement
jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts
socat- connect anything to anythingfor example
socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345socat tcp-listen:12345 -socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345ncdu
pipeviewer or
pvDiscovered about rg recently and it is cool!
I love
ncdufor seeing where all my storage is being taken up.Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can
cp -gto see progress. Set an alias :)Where can this variant of coreutils be found? This is the first time I have heard of it.
grep goes crazy if you know your regex
I was expecting this one.
I’m a big fan of
screenbecause 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
tmuxfor 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.”
