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.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago
    • xargs
    • parallel
    • PXE (ohai cobbler)
    • tee
    • task-spooler (ts aka tsp)
    • rpm -V

    Nothing new, just forgotten.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      task-spooler (ts aka tsp)

      This looks amazing. Do you know how well it works in dispatching and tracking jobs over remote servers (over SSH)?

      • Sʏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        3 months ago

        We’ve been using tsp at my work for years and it works well. It is just a very basic queueing system so if you can run the job from the command line then you can run it via tsp.

        Our workflow is to have concurrent jobs run on the remote servers with cron and tsp but you should be able to trigger remote jobs over SSH also if you prefer to have a single machine in charge of task allocation.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      Hey, still the quickest way to copy any damn text from a terminal elsewhere is with the mouse. Tmux is a joke for this.

      Why can’t terminal emulators just make this easy

      • bedheadkitten@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        Wezterm has made this easy : shift + ctrl + x and your in vim motion moving all over with yank line or word or visual mode. It’s super awesome! I never touch my mouse. You can also remap the keymap of course.

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 months ago

      I immediately had flashbacks of diagnosing bad I/O performance on CentOS 5 servers. That was the week when I learned what updatedb is and why it was always running in the background (there was a lot of files)

    • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      I love locate! I have a cronjob that updates the db every night, then I can just find a file without having to think about where it is

      • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 months ago

        No sorry, I should have elaborated. The package name is mlocate but the command is locate. Occasionally run updatedb as it populates an sqlite db with every file on your system that you can then list out using locate followed by the filename you want to locate.

  • wasabi@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    3 months ago

    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.

      • wasabi@lemmy.eco.br
        0·
        3 months ago

        You type tldr and then some command. For example, tldr tar. It gives you a small list of examples and common use cases for the command.

        • pool_spray_098@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          That sounds excellent, can’t wait to try it.

          Sometimes manpages are frustrating as hell because there are no examples. They read more like the developer making notes for themselves who is already intricately familiar with the program on how it works, rather than teaching someone to use the program.

          So many times I’m shaking me head, like please show me an example of a syntactically correct command, what is wrong with you!!

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    I like https://github.com/aristocratos/btop personally. It’s way prettier than the normal top command which you use to watch processes to find the one that’s hogging all of the CPU or whatever. And it’s not so much that it’s underrated so much as it’s not very well known or distributed by default.

  • stembolts@programming.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    awk

    …for parsing the output of other commands quickly and simply. Then that parsed output can be used to create simple log messages or be passed as args to other scripts. Powerful.

    • mfat@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      awk and sed have always been intimidating for me with that cryptic syntax.

      • stembolts@programming.dev
        0·
        3 months ago

        I agree with your sentiment regarding confusing syntax, however I think that confusion simply requires a calculated approach to dispell it.

        It’s a prime example of why I use scripts as reminders as much as I use them functionally. I work out the syntax once… save it to an example script, then save myself 20 minutes of remembering by just $ cat ./path/to/script.sh and copying said syntax.

        So if you can change your workflow such that learned things stay around as examples, I feel that you will pick it up much more quickly :)

  • helmet91@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    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

    • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Just be careful with files with spaces in the name. There’s an incantation with xargs that I always have to look up when I want to use it safely.