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Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#4
One that I have recently been using more and more is time, but don't forget there is a difference between bash's "time" command and /usr/bin/time . I use both.

The majority in the list seem pretty common, but I guess with more and more gui dependents some people just never spent days wading through man pages or info coreutils, so still useful.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#7
I found jq the other day (http://stedolan.github.io/jq/), which is a commandline utility for manipulating json data, resembling awk.

Considering the number of API's that return json data these days, it's simplified my life a great deal. It's proven especially useful for automation shell scripts, when working with things like the aws command line client that return all results as json. Usually I'm looking to extract something like a single field to use as input for a following command, and jq makes it really easy. No more inline python or awkward sed regex's. :)

It's available using apt-get on debian/ubuntu, but that version is out of date with the online docs. It's rather trivial to build from source though (it has no external deps).

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