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
    19·
    3 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
  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    7·
    2 days ago

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

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 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·
        3 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 :).

    • CAVOK@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 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.

    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 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·
        2 days ago

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

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    3 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·
      3 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.

      • Raptorox@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        3 days 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.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 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
        2·
        3 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.

      • markstos@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 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.

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
    631·
    4 days 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

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      18·
      4 days 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

    • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      13·
      4 days ago

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

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      7·
      4 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.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 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·
          3 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.

  • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world
    71·
    3 days ago

    motion

    After spending years dealing with shady freeware and junk software on windows, I was floored by how easy and nonchalantly I was able to set up a simple security camera on my PC

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    3 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

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
    19·
    3 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

  • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    ip eg:

    # ip a
# ip a a 192.168.1.99/24 dev enp160

    The first incantation - ip address (you can abbreviate whilst it is unambiguous) gets you a quick report of interfaces, MAC, IPs and so on. The second command assigns another IP address to an interface. Handy for setting up devices which don’t do DHCP out of the box or already have an IP and need a good talking to.

    Oh and you can completely set up your IP stack, interfaces and routing etc with it. Throw in nft or iptables (old school these days - sigh!) for filtering and other network packet mangling shenanigans.