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Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

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Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#13
I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log.

I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#14

How this compares to busybox[1]? Additional functionality? I would rather stick to posix/unix commands than learn a new list of new functions [1]: https://www.busybox.net/

This seems to be cross-platform, while BusyBox is mostly Linux-only.

Busybox only gives full support for Linux, but can be and is frequently compile for a lot of operating systems, including Windows that is not a *nix per se and also embedded systems

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#15

How this compares to busybox[1]? Additional functionality? I would rather stick to posix/unix commands than learn a new list of new functions [1]: https://www.busybox.net/

Completely different beasts. Busybox is a tight, lightweight implementation of [a subset of] the Posix toolchain. This thing - also tight and lightweight - is a collection of commands primarily geared towards manipulation of file names and contents. Highly un-unixy (more like "do all sorts of things and do them well") but with clear, straightforward, non-arcane syntacs. I had a pile of somewhat complex text transform…

Got it. Even so I still prefer to learn only unix and go with it, most of the time awk solves all my data problems

About your transformation problems, give a look at NuShell[1], it's a full fledged shell but I rarely use it as a interactive shell, mostly as a scripting language, it heavily simplifies the extract, transform and load from the terminal. Also it's written in Rust and available to most mainstream OSes

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#16
post #13

I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log. I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

I wonder if shells history could have an option for this. Typing 90% levenstein distance commands just a few too many time as a signal ordered by freq.

You'd get logs of what you struggle on or do very often.

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#17
post #13

I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log. I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

Oh I'm actually just learning unix/how to work properly in the Command line and building this personal source of knowledge up and am wondering if you'd be down to share/point me to places that are good resources (beyond, of course, the man pages)

also the tool discussed here is available via scoop for windows if we're trying it out

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#18
post #13

I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log. I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

I wonder if shells history could have an option for this. Typing 90% levenstein distance commands just a few too many time as a signal ordered by freq. You'd get logs of what you struggle on or do very often.

If I was smarter I could probably use that. I tried it in the beginning and was just basically keeping an infinite history by catting the history from my old machines into my new.

But then I started doing stuff outside of shell (windows, code snippets, jq and path snippets, etc) and it was getting to be a pain to grep through such a big file. So I applied the 5 minute rule and tried to rely on my laziness as an editor.

Also, while my file isn’t public I don’t keep anything sensitive or that would bother any past, present, or future employers and collaborators so sanitizing the shell history was starting to take time and make me worry that I might miss something.

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#19
post #13

I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log. I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

Oh I'm actually just learning unix/how to work properly in the Command line and building this personal source of knowledge up and am wondering if you'd be down to share/point me to places that are good resources (beyond, of course, the man pages) also the tool discussed here is available via scoop for windows if we're trying it out

Comically my favorite reference is a paper fold out cheat sheet I got 30 years ago. I’d link you to the company but it’s in my office gathering dust for the past year. I could find it through googling and don’t want to point you to one I don’t know about.

Beyond man, I use a very inefficient system of googling “man ls” (or whatever) and using the example sites, and end up using Linux.die.net [0] the most and find it easier to use than the actual man command.

And I found ESR’s guides [1] really helpful for understanding just how stuff works.

I’m sure I would drive a proper Unix user/sysadmin fits, but I just never am root and always have a backup to restore when I break stuff. So it’s hard for me to really break something.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html

Re: Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

#20

How this compares to busybox[1]? Additional functionality? I would rather stick to posix/unix commands than learn a new list of new functions [1]: https://www.busybox.net/

It's very similar, except that its heritage is clearly the world of MS/PC/DR-DOS style toolsets rather than Unix toolsets. It's a multiple-function binary, with freely licensed source code, that basically provides a whole bunch of otherwise standalone tools in one.

The difference is that the standalone tools have the sorts of semantics that will be very familiar to people who lived through the times of MS/PC/DR-DOS shareware, where there were (and still are) loads of tools in this vein, both standalone and all-in-one. Both minus and plus are command-line switch characters. There's no special GNU-style marker for "long" options to differentiate them from "short" options. Command names and functions follow conventions that were more common in the MS/PC/DR-DOS shareware world (e.g. DELTREE, HEXTOBIN, HEXDUMP, COLOR, FIND). And PC-isms like the idea that there are 16 CGA colours are baked in (c.f. this toolset's ECHO command).

If you've used the Norton Utilities, the Graham Utilities, JP Software's 4DOS/4OS2/4NT, my OS/2 (and earlier DOS) Command Line Utilities, or any of the many implementations of commands such as DELTREE that were available, this sort of thing is very familiar and comfortable territory.

* https://jpsoft.com/help/tcc_and_tcclite.htm

* http://www.warpspeed.com.au/Products/OS2/GU/graham.htm

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/clu.html

* https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?dir=/&stype=all&sort=type_name&sear...

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