Linux

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

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

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

Control+r == search through your bash history.

I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.

jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts

I use fuck to fix typos

bc

It's a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.

Pandoc.

grep goes crazy if you know your regex

Man

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.

The pipe (|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.

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

xargs

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

awk

probably well known at this point but rsync is incredible and I use it all the time

I find myself using tldr a lot since finding out about it. It's just so useful for commands that I don't use enough to commit to memory.

nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.

Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason.. also hate that vim must be used for certain files.

batcat

It's like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.

Oh also, tldr

My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage

I know tmux is incredibly popular, but a good use case for it that isn’t common is teaching people how to do things in the terminal. You can both be attached to the same tmux session, and both type into the same shell.

I don't see anyone mentions htop. So, I will:) Just works, could be installed in any distro. Much more friendly than top but isn't bloated with features as some other alternatives are.

+1 for Caddy, completely replaced nginx. also...

• Starship - shell prompt
• tmux - terminal multiplexer
• parallel - parallel command runner
• restic - backup tool
• age - modern file encryption

kde connect

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

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

sshfs

yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!

Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn't as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.

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).

ncdu

Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can cp -g to see progress. Set an alias :)

Discovered about rg recently and it is cool!