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
    18·
    3 months 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
  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    17·
    3 months ago

    socat - connect anything to anything

    for example

    socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

    socat tcp-listen:12345 -

    socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
    15·
    3 months ago

    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

    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months 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
    11·
    3 months ago

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

    • kyub@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      netstat is kind of deprecated, ss is more modern (from the iproute2 package) and uses very similar parameters.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 months 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

    • CAVOK@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months 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.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    3 months 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
      0·
      3 months 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.

      • Raptorox@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        3 months ago

        That will just wait for command to finish properly and then run yes.

        What you want to run is yes | command, so it spams the command with confirmations.

          • valkyre09@lemmy.world
            3·
            3 months ago

            Who 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.
      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 months 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).

      • markstos@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 months 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.

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 months 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 @[email protected] for the correction.

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      3 months ago

      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

    • HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        3 months ago

        Fish is a replacement of bash that’s a bit more user friendly (has some cool auto completion features out of the box and more sane behaviour like handling of spaces when expanding variables). I personally started to use nutshell recently but unlike fish it’s very different from bash.

        Starship is a “prompt” for various shells (that bit of text in terminal before you enter the command that shows current user and directory in bash). I haven’t used it but AFAIK it has many features like showing current time, integration with git, etc.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yep, here’s my Starship prompt, for example:

          So, I have it configured to show:

          • the exit code of the last command (if it’s non-zero),
          • the duration of the last command (if it’s longer than 2 seconds),
          • the time (when the last command ended),
          • the current directory,
          • the current Git branch, and it also shows some Git status information, for example the $ means I have something stashed,
          • and finally the technology in use in a repository/directory, so in this case that repo uses Rust and the compiler version is 1.83.
            • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Oh, when you’re coding something in a Git repo and you realize that you need to make a different change before you continue coding (e.g. switch to a branch, pull newest changes, or just create a separate smaller commit for part of your change), then you can run git stash push to put away your current changes, then make your other change, and then run git stash pop to bring your ongoing changes back. I recommend reading git stash --help, if you want to use it.

              Sometimes, though, you might end up just taking it into a different direction altogether or simply forget that you had something stashed. That’s when that indicator comes in handy. Because while you can have multiple things stashed, I do find it’s best not to keep them around for too long. If you do want to keep them for longer, then you can always create a branch and commit it as WIP onto there, so that you can push it onto a remote repo.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    3 months ago

    nmap *your_local_ip_address*

    for example

    nmap 192.168.1.43/24 will 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).

    • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      3 months ago

      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.