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
    20·
    4 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
    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      4 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·
        3 days ago

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

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      2·
      4 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·
        4 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 :).

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
    651·
    5 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·
      5 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·
      5 days ago

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

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 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·
        4 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·
          4 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.

    • CAVOK@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 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.

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    7·
    3 days ago

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

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    4 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·
      4 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·
        4 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·
        4 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·
        4 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·
        4 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.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
    19·
    4 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

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    4 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

  • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
    282·
    5 days ago

    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.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        4·
        5 days ago

        one of my favorite linux youtubers is named vimjoyer so maybe one day I will try to learn it

        • Caveman@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 days ago

          I use vim mode everywhere I can and vim in the console, it took a bit of effort to learn but it was fun and satisfying. Highly recommend, I’m a vim user now for 7 years.

        • bishbosh@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          I’ve liked helix a bit more. It takes less initial set up, and generally has the mentality of showing what you’re about to change before inputting a change command.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      8·
      5 days ago

      Wow you triggered a lot of vim users !

      Maybe give micro a shot :) It’s nano but more sane defaults and comes with customization in mind.

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
      3·
      4 days ago

      vim isn’t required for any files, you just followed online tutorials for how to edit those files instead of RTFM

      terminal text editing is convoluted because it has to strike a balance between figuring out when a keypress is part of the text you’re typing, vs when it’s a command you’re using, and making sure that all the editor commands the designer wanted are accessible.

      vim is great because it allows for thousands more editing commands and macros, and much more customization of the editor, up to allowing plugins that emulate other functionality. As it stands, my setup basically functions as a full, lightweight-ish, multi-language IDE that rivals Emacs or Visual Studio.

      On top of all that, I don’t have to move my hands away from the homerow of keys to navigate or edit, which may not seem like much, but adds up to a lot of avoid typos and time saved from moving my hands to reach the arrows/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn.

      Some examples:

      h, j,k,l move left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g. 6j will move down 6 rows

      dd deletes a line, but using a number + d + a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g. 34dl will delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor, 12dk will delete 12 lines up.

      gg will take you to the first line, G will take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g. 3275gg or 3275G will take you to line 3275

      and finally you can use /text or regex pattern you want to search for and Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then use n to search for the next occurence, or N to search for the previous

      That doesn’t even scratch the surface (that’s just the cheatsheet, which only scratches the surface), but if you can get a handle on only what I’ve said, and switching between input and command mode (i and Esc respectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.

      And as always, don’t forget to :wq (write to file and quit)

    • jayandp@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      5 days ago

      Yeah, to this day vim still isn’t intuitive for me, so I just use nano as it’s either often included or simple to install on most Distros.

      Unless a script is hardcoded for vim I haven’t had to use it.

      • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        It’s weird but VIM is so powerful and I love it but i also agree it wouldn’t be the default just an option if you needed it. It’s like with notepad ++ on windows it’s wonderful but not everyone needs it from day one notepad will work just fine for basic typing.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        31·
        5 days ago

        Cant remember exactly but it had something to do with a file relating to sudo and it only was allowed to be edited with a vim style editor.

        • johant@lemmy.ml
          1·
          1 day ago

          The EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables are usually read by command line tools to launch your preferred editor. You could set VISUAL to nano before launching visudo and you would be editing the sudoers file in nano.

        • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          5 days ago

          There may be certain times where it’s all that’s available, I think I remember having to edit fstab in some recovery state in vi

        • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          4 days ago

          /etc/sudoers?

          you can just edit that with nano or whatever, the visudo thing they tell you to use is goofy and I don’t like it

    • Karmmah@lemmy.world
      21·
      5 days ago

      I used nano when I started but now I am using vim for one year already. I’d recommend taking a few days where you only use vim and I think you will see why people like it. With a few motions you can be much faster than you would be in Nano.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        3·
        5 days ago

        One of the big reasons I switched to nixos is that I mostly need to use the console only for updating my system by editing the configuration file using nano. I do very little besides that thankfully while the GUI side of linux gets better everyday.