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.
socat- connect anything to anythingfor example
socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345socat tcp-listen:12345 -socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345I 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
It also supports ripping playlists. Fantastic to archive a set locally…
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
Wait how?
I just run
mpv $URLThis is the only way to watch twitch
With their huge, clunky UI and my 1080p screen, yeah it is.
mpv --ytdl URL. Read starting from --ytdl option in the mpv man page, you can even give specific yt-dlp options through --ytdl-raw-options.
Since everyone keeps mentioning yt-dlp I gotta ask: what’s wrong with the original youtube-dl? I keep using it, it works, it’s still being updated.
yt-dlp has sponsorblock features, youtube-dl does not.
There are feature differences there’s also a convenience factor: youtube-dl people for some reason stopped doing releases, so you can’t get a fresh version from pypi (only installing from github or their site). Yt-dlp is on pypi, including nightly builds.
The huge list of sites can be found here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/tree/master/yt_dlp/extractor
Not powerful, but often useful,
column -taligns columns in all lines. EG$ 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 ccc888Control+r == search through your bash history.
I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.
jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts
I use fuck to fix typos
That’s fantastic, I can’t wait to go home and install it
this just reminds me of
pleasewhich runs the previous command withsudosudo !!Will also run the previous command with sudo, fwiw.
If you’d map it to just
fit’s even more handyYou gain efficiency, but lose fun
That sounds dangerous. I hope it never tries to fix anything with
rmYou have to confirm any command before it runs, so no more dangerous than baseline rm
Game changer!
I use fuckit to fix exceptions
bcIt’s a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.
Pandoc.
grep goes crazy if you know your regex
I can never get grep to work consistently on Mac and Linux. Now, ripgrep OTOH…
That’s because Macs generally use BSD-based command line tools instead of GNU ones. You have to do a lot of Homebrew jiggery-pokery to approximate a GNU environment. Know Your Tools: Linux (GNU) vs. Mac (BSD) Command Line Utilities
Alas, doesn’t fit my purpose since it requires action by the script user. I usually just use perl in those situations
Check out my chapter on GNU grep BRE/ERE for those wanting to learn this regex flavor: https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/breere-regular-expressions.html (there’s also another chapter for PCRE)
yesThe 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.
Man
The pipe (
|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.zoxide. It’s a fabulous
cdreplacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you’ve navigated to a directory, instead of having to typecd /super/long/directory/path, you can typezoxide pathand it’ll take you right to/super/long/directory/path.I have it aliased to
zd. I love it and install it on every systemYou can do things like using a partial directory name and it’ll jump you to the closest match in the database. So
zoxide pawould take you to/super/long/directory/path.And you can do partial paths. Say you’ve got two directories named
datain your filesystem.One at
/super/long/directory/path1/dataAnd the other at
/super/long/directory/path2/dataYou can do
zoxide path2 dataand you’ll go to/super/long/directory/path2/dataYou can do
zoxide path2 dataI usually would just do
z 2data. Yes, I’m lazy. It’s the perfect tool for lazy people.Nice! I guess I can be even lazier when navigating!
Sounds a lot like autojump
I’m not familiar with
autojump
Better than fasd?
xargs
netstat -tunlshows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.
