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Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#11

Post by VLM »

Site's non-responsive now, wonder what the list was?

I'll vote for "yes" which at least seems intuitively useful in a "yes | rm -i something" kind of way. Well that specific example is useless... Also over two decades ago if you obtained access to someones account it was considered highly amusing to end their .profile with a call to /bin/yes. Oh and before the newfangled /dev/urandom (or /dev/zero) we used to redirect "yes" out to media to wipe them or test overall system thruput.

Now for one thats truly obscure and ripe for abuse because no one ever runs it anymore, try RMT the remote magtape manipulator.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#12

Post by arjn »

Plenty on this list are well known but there are some nice ones that either I'd forgotten about or didn't know : column, ss, comm, fc

I'd add the following to the list : printf , bc

Also, "ddate" is fun. I had no idea and just spent an enjoyable 10 minutes looking it up.

Thanks for posting this.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#13

Post by holyjaw »

dctoedt wrote: post #9
ben336 wrote: post #6

vim and xargs are less commonly used commands? Seems to be a mix here of small unix-y utilities and larger programs (like vim and tmux). Good stuff to know though.

FTA: vim: attack yourself Emacs user?

Nah, he's a vim user IIRC. He has a really good vim tutorial on his site [0].

[0]: http://www.danielmiessler.com/study/vim/

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#17

Post by JadeNB »

VLM wrote: post #11

Site's non-responsive now, wonder what the list was? I'll vote for "yes" which at least seems intuitively useful in a "yes | rm -i something" kind of way. Well that specific example is useless... Also over two decades ago if you obtained access to someones account it was considered highly amusing to end their .profile with a call to /bin/yes. Oh and before the newfangled /dev/urandom (or /dev/zero) we used to redirec…

> I'll vote for "yes" which at least seems intuitively useful in a "yes | rm -i something" kind of way.

I use it when I want to compile a LaTeX document and ignore errors:

    $ yes ^M | pdflatex document
(useful because TeX tools hate accepting command-line options).

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#19

Post by JadeNB »

dctoedt wrote: post #9
ben336 wrote: post #6

vim and xargs are less commonly used commands? Seems to be a mix here of small unix-y utilities and larger programs (like vim and tmux). Good stuff to know though.

FTA: vim: attack yourself Emacs user?

> > FTA: vim: attack yourself

> Emacs user?

As holyjaw mentions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253126), this appears to be a vimmer's self mockery, rather than an Emacsy attack:

http://www.danielmiessler.com/blog/categories/vim

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