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.

  • deathbird@mander.xyz
    11·
    6 days ago

    Underrated? I’d say lftp is the best FTP command line client there is. And Midnight Commander is a very very good file browser. I don’t see either praised enough.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      62·
      6 days ago

      Gripes:

      • starship and all these shell frameworks are overbloated. Just write your own prompt command and be done with it.

      • restic, ongoing issue with the author to allow people to backup without a password. Seems like a no-brainer but he’s being difficult

      • Shimitar@feddit.it
        31·
        6 days ago

        Why would you want password less backups?

        I understand if the reason is ‘just because’, but seriously, why? I just write down the password in a text file for restic --password and I am done.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          6·
          6 days ago

          write down the password where though, somewhere I can guarantee it will always be there 10 years from now? That’s a big ask of me

          • Shimitar@feddit.it
            31·
            6 days ago

            10 years? Boy you are joung :)

            I have encrypted files from w 20 years ago, and unencrypted files from 30 years ago.

            And digitized stuff from analogic of 40 and 50 years ago.

          • Shimitar@feddit.it
            3·
            6 days ago

            That is true for lots of things.

            Moreover I use one easy “default” password for all basic stuff, and its always the same known to my spouse and written down on paper.

            At least my offsite backups are protected from prying eyes. Maybe uneeded for local backups, but doesn’t hurt to have.

          • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            6 days ago

            I keep mine in Bitwarden, I export that data every 3 months and store it in a Backblaze backup, I have it written on a piece of paper stored in a locked fire box in my house, and that paper scanned in my phone.

            I can’t imagine not having at least one of those in 10 years and I can’t imagine all four failing in the same week.

            Does that give you any helpful ideas that would work for you?

            • tetris11@lemmy.ml
              2·
              6 days ago

              None that I can see persisting, as I move around a lot and my backups tend to get boxed up for periods of time before being unboxed. But, I appreciate the effort

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    6 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
    • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      17·
      7 days ago

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

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        1·
        6 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·
          6 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.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      8·
      7 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.

      • jennraeross@lemmy.world
        8·
        7 days ago

        Helix is a terminal based text editor. It’s much like vim / neovim, but unlike those editors it’s good to go right out of the box, no configuration or plugins needed to make it work well.

        Topgrade is one I haven’t used, but it looks like its intended purpose is to let you upgrade your apps with one command, even if you use multiple different package managers (I.e. if you were on Ubuntu, you could use it to upgrade your apt packages, at the same time as your snap packages, as well as flatpak, nix, and homebrew if you’ve added those.)

      • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
        5·
        7 days 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
          8·
          7 days 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
              3·
              6 days ago

              Nope, I’m glad to share.

              I personalized it from the “Gruvbox Rainbow” preset from here: https://starship.rs/presets/
              So, you might prefer that, if you’re not, well, me.

              You will need to set up a NerdFont, like the Starship installation guide says.

              Here’s my configuration:

              Spoiler 
              "$schema" = 'https://starship.rs/config-schema.json'

format = """
[$status](bg:color_red fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_red bg:color_orange)\
[$cmd_duration](bg:color_orange fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_orange bg:color_yellow)\
[$time](bg:color_yellow fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_yellow)\
$line_break\
[$directory](bg:color_aqua fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_aqua bg:color_blue)\
[$git_branch\
$git_status](bg:color_blue fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_blue bg:color_bg3)\
[$c\
$rust\
$golang\
$nodejs\
$php\
$java\
$kotlin\
$haskell\
$python\
$docker_context](bg:color_bg3 fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_bg3)\
$line_break\
$line_break"""

palette = 'gruvbox_dark'

[palettes.gruvbox_dark]
color_fg0 = '#ffffff'
color_bg1 = '#3c3836'
color_bg3 = '#665c54'
color_blue = '#458588'
color_aqua = '#689d6a'
color_green = '#98971a'
color_orange = '#d65d0e'
color_purple = '#b16286'
color_red = '#cc241d'
color_yellow = '#d79921'

[status]
disabled = false
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $status '

[username]
format = ' $user '

[directory]
format = " $path "
truncation_length = 3
truncation_symbol = "…/"

[directory.substitutions]
"Documents" = "󰈙 "
"Downloads" = " "
"Music" = "󰝚 "
"Pictures" = " "
"Projects" = "󰲋 "

[git_branch]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $branch '

[git_status]
style = "bg:color_aqua"
format = '$all_status$ahead_behind '

[nodejs]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[c]
symbol = " "
format = ' $symbol $version '

[rust]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[golang]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[php]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[java]
symbol = " "
format = ' $symbol $version '

[kotlin]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[haskell]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[python]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[cmd_duration]
format = ' 󱦟 $duration '

[time]
disabled = false
time_format = "%R"
format = '  $time '

[line_break]
disabled = false
            • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
              7·
              6 days 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.

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      27·
      7 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

    • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
      2·
      6 days 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
        7·
        7 days 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.

        EDIT: Lol. Sorry barely read your reply. Yes, you should wear a fedora while installing mlocate.

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
      2·
      4 days 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)

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago
    • xargs
    • parallel
    • PXE (ohai cobbler)
    • tee
    • task-spooler (ts aka tsp)
    • rpm -V

    Nothing new, just forgotten.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      2·
      6 days 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
        4·
        6 days 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.

    • mfat@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      7 days ago

      Cool. I’d never heard of this and I’ve used Debian for years.

  • kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    6 days ago

    tmsu is pretty cool - it creates a little db and uses that to track tags on your files without ever touching them. It also has it’s own little tag based filesystem.

    • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
      181·
      7 days ago

      I use it occasionally but every time I need to do something a tiny bit more complex than “extract field from an object” I have to spend half an hour studying its manual, at which point it’s faster to just write a Python script doing exactly what I need it to do.

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          6 days ago

          I actually installed it recently out of curiosity, but I’m hesitant about learning its advanced features like that. At least jq is a standalone tool that’s more ubiquitous than nushell, so you can rely on it even in environments that you don’t fully control (e.g. CI like GitHub Actions). And if you use it in some public code/scripts then other people will be more familiar with it too.

  • Serge Matveenko@lemmings.worldEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    On the subject of editors, joe is just awesome: lightweight, powerful, had coffee coloring and line numbers, and you can choose it with Ctrl+C:)