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.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    11 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.

    • alvendam@lemmy.world
      0·
      11 months 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
        1·
        11 months 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.

          • valkyre09@lemmy.world
            2·
            11 months ago

            Who said it was better? It’s just my favourite.

            Like my favourite shirt, it’s no better than the others, but it brings me a little joy :)

            • on a serious note though, thank you for sharing your two examples - I didn’t know they existed.
      • markstos@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months 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.

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        11 months 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.

        • lengau@midwest.social
          1·
          11 months ago

          You’ve got it backwards - you need to pipe the output of yes into the input of the command:

          yes | command-that-asks-a-lot-of-questions