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:12345Not 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 ccc888I 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…
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
Wait how?
I just run
mpv $URLThis is the only way to watch twitch
mpv --ytdl URL. Read starting from --ytdl option in the mpv man page, you can even give specific yt-dlp options through --ytdl-raw-options.
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.
There are minor feature differences there’s also a convenience factor: youtube-dl people for some reason stopped doing releases, so you can’t get a fresh version from pypi (only installing from github or their site). Yt-dlp is on pypi, including nightly builds.
The huge list of sites can be found here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/tree/master/yt_dlp/extractor
Control+r == search through your bash history.
I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.
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.
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
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.
jq - 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
Combine with jc to process CSV files. This is how I get data into my plain text accounting system.
jqandyqare both things I install on pretty much every machine I have.
I use fuck to fix typos
That’s fantastic, I can’t wait to go home and install it
this just reminds me of
pleasewhich runs the previous command withsudosudo !!Will also run the previous command with sudo, fwiw.
If you’d map it to just
fit’s even more handyYou gain efficiency, but lose fun
Game changer!
That sounds dangerous. I hope it never tries to fix anything with
rmYou have to confirm any command before it runs, so no more dangerous than baseline rm
I use fuckit to fix exceptions
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 :).
Pandoc.
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!
That’s really neat but also seems like it could be quite dangerous in a lot of use-cases!
Absolutely, but when you do need it, it’s brilliant.
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.
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.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).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.
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.
grep goes crazy if you know your regex
I can never get grep to work consistently on Mac and Linux. Now, ripgrep OTOH…
That’s because Macs generally use BSD-based command line tools instead of GNU ones. You have to do a lot of Homebrew jiggery-pokery to approximate a GNU environment. Know Your Tools: Linux (GNU) vs. Mac (BSD) Command Line Utilities
Alas, doesn’t fit my purpose since it requires action by the script user. I usually just use perl in those situations
Check out my chapter on GNU grep BRE/ERE for those wanting to learn this regex flavor: https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/breere-regular-expressions.html (there’s also another chapter for PCRE)
xargs
zoxide. It’s a fabulous
cdreplacement. 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 pathand 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 pawould take you to/super/long/directory/path.And you can do partial paths. Say you’ve got two directories named
datain your filesystem.One at
/super/long/directory/path1/dataAnd the other at
/super/long/directory/path2/dataYou can do
zoxide path2 dataand you’ll go to/super/long/directory/path2/dataYou can do
zoxide path2 dataI usually would just do
z 2data. Yes, I’m lazy. It’s the perfect tool for lazy people.Nice! I guess I can be even lazier when navigating!
Sounds a lot like autojump
I’m not familiar with
autojump
Better than fasd?
The pipe (
|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.jq?
I use it occasionally but every time I need to do something a tiny bit more complex than “extract field from an object” I have to spend half an hour studying its manual, at which point it’s faster to just write a Python script doing exactly what I need it to do.
Check out https://www.nushell.sh/ I use it for exactly that, i.e. complex extract and convert files
I actually installed it recently out of curiosity, but I’m hesitant about learning its advanced features like that. At least jq is a standalone tool that’s more ubiquitous than nushell, so you can rely on it even in environments that you don’t fully control (e.g. CI like GitHub Actions). And if you use it in some public code/scripts then other people will be more familiar with it too.
yq can do both JSON and YAML :)
https://github.com/johnkerl/miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
Funny how this was one of the first tools I learnt once I “seriously” started my linux journey, lol
