this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 days ago (4 children)

The mouse.

Bring on the downvotes. 🎉

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 week ago (18 children)

A few that I use every day:

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

Just commenting to give more love to helix. It's my favorite "small quick edits" editor.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 week ago (9 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I use fuckit to fix exceptions

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

That's fantastic, I can't wait to go home and install it

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (5 children)

grep goes crazy if you know your regex

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

There is also zellij, which can do the same but also has modern functionality specific for development workspaces!

(Although screen or tmux will still probably be more widely available on remote machines etc)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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."

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (35 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

igtfo<ESC>
:q!

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago (4 children)

You can change your hate to love by using vim

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

You can change that by changing your editor global variable

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Can it handle a file that has corrupt json? Or does it just tell you "no"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

I used jq for something similar before, recently I've discovered Nu Shell and have been using that for converting and analyzing data since a full shell is a lot more powerful than a command (e.g. open a yaml, for each element on key X grab the first element of list Y and export to a CSV)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Also Ctrl+D to exit any shell and Ctrl+R for reverse searching your history!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

dd is probably well known, but one of the simplest and most powerful ways to accidentally delete all data on your hard drive. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

I love ncdu for seeing where all my storage is being taken up.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how underrated it is but the exec feature in find is so useful, there are so many bulk tasks that would just be incredibly difficult otherwise but instead are just one line

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Use less for checking contents of files. Many people use cat all the time, but I don't like it, because if you do that often, your terminal window quickly gets flooded with stuff, and then you have to scroll up and down if you wanna see a previous output. With less, your file opens in a different "frame", which you can close when you're done.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

I'd like to interject for a moment. There is also a tool called bat that is just cat with extra features. It prints out and works just like cat, but when the contents get too big, it works like less. The is syntax highlighting and works with git.

It's replaced my need for cat and less.

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