Either built-in tools, or those that follow the UNIX philosophy.
My favorite hidden gems in a base UNIX install are `tac` (print lines in reverse order) and `tr` (character substitutions).
Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#2[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#3awk
(It's a guilty pleasure to write shell pipelines that use awk to write a shell script and then pipe that script in sh, I find it easier than looking up the bizzaro syntax for loops in bash in the info pages.)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#4tr is surprisingly useful. If you're clever, the -c and -d flags can do good things.
wc is also useful, mostly as "wc -l". If you keep data in line oriented, human readable form, "wc -l" counts data items.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#5xclock with the cat theme
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#6awk (It's a guilty pleasure to write shell pipelines that use awk to write a shell script and then pipe that script in sh, I find it easier than looking up the bizzaro syntax for loops in bash in the info pages.)
> use awk to write a shell script
Do you have any examples of this?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#8perl-rename - rename is also good, but much more annoying to use for me as it doesn't use standard regex notation like perl-rename.
printf - shell is natively great at interpolation already, but having C-style printf formatting is often useful and echo has a lot of footguns
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#9awk (It's a guilty pleasure to write shell pipelines that use awk to write a shell script and then pipe that script in sh, I find it easier than looking up the bizzaro syntax for loops in bash in the info pages.)
> use awk to write a shell script Do you have any examples of this?
How about
ls -l *.txt | awk '{if ($5Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite UNIX tools?
#10ctrl-r in bash tops my list, even if it's not quite what you are thinking of as a unix tool.
Probably the pipe itself would be my favorite next.
Then in no particular order: tail, cut, xargs, wc, tr, grep, sort, uniq.