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.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    6 days ago

    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
    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        1·
        5 days ago

        It’s not even pretty or accessible. 2-spaced indentation is incredibly hard to read.

    • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      7 days ago

      Just commenting to give more love to helix. It’s my favorite “small quick edits” editor.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        1·
        6 days ago

        It does have clojure lsp support, but you’ll probably have to use a command line for most repls.

        • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.ml
          2·
          6 days ago

          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.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      1·
      6 days ago

      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

      • gens@programming.dev
        1·
        6 days ago

        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 :).

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    6 days ago

    yes

    The 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.

    • alvendam@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • markstos@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 days ago

        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.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        2·
        6 days ago

        true delivers error level 0, false error level 1.

        yes && echo True || echo False will always be True.

        false && echo True || echo False will always be False.

        Common usage is for tools that ask for permissions and similiar. yes | cp -i has the same effect as cp --force (-i: prompt before overwrites).

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        Sorry, I should have explained that. it’s command | yes yes|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.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    ddccontrol… it looks complicated on the surface but it’s really not and being able to control monitor brightness without fcking around in some garbage monitor OSD is a god sent and should be the standard

    • CAVOK@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      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.”

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        9·
        7 days ago

        Tmux / Screen is like the emacs/vim of the modern day Linux I think.

        Screen is more than capable, but for those who have moved to Tmux, they will absolutely advocate for it.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
        1·
        7 days ago

        It’s not as useful, sadly. Nohup disconnects standard input, output, and error. With screen or tmux, you can reattach them later.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
        1·
        7 days ago

        I’ve had nohup fail to keep things running after my session ended quite frequently. It’s like it just goes to the next step in the process then gives up.

    • surfrock66@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      I know everyone likes tmux but screen is phenomenal. I have a .screenrc I deploy everywhere with a statusbar at the bottom, a set number of pre-defined tabs, and logging to a directory (which is cleaned up after 30 days) so I can go back and figure out what I did. Great tool.

    • villainy@lemmy.world
      5·
      7 days ago

      Woah screen is seeing active development again? There was like a decade where it stagnated. So much so that different distros were packaging different custom feature patches (IIRC only Ubuntu had a vertical split patch by default?) Looking at it now, the new screen maintainers had to skip a version to not conflict with forks that had become popular.

      When tmux stabilized I jumped ship immediately and never looked back.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
    13·
    6 days ago

    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 type cd /super/long/directory/path, you can type zoxide 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 system

    You 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

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    4·
    5 days ago

    netstat -tunl shows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.