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.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    9·
    2 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
    8·
    2 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
    7·
    2 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
    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 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.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 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.

  • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 months 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.

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      2 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·
      1 month 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·
        2 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·
          2 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·
              2 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.

  • HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    1 month ago

    Most listed in some form elsewhere, but

    • Ugrep
    • ranger/lf
    • tmux (splitting terminal and detatching/reattaching when I’m sshing onto server, etc)

    I’ve also been enjoying Kate. It’s a decent text editor, but the ability to Ctrl + / to pipe selected lines through any Linux command (Uniq, shuf, etc) is a bit of a superpower for an editor

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 months 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.

    • HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      1 month ago

      I love flexibility with regex, personally I use ugrep as it also allows utilization of boolean and/or/not logic for more complicated searches.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    2 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).

    • CAVOK@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 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.