Live data from Hacker News

Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

danielmiessler.com

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX is unix, in the same way that Solaris or AIX is, but I'd have split them out in a separate section for OSX specific Unix software.

Exactly - OS X is Unix(tm), but davexunit's complaint is that the term "Unix commands" implies "commands that will work on all/most UNIX/POSIX systems", not "commands for a single OS that happens also to be a UNIX".

I agree with the complaint too but not only are many of these commands mac only but in addition to that, they are not less commonly used (ex vim). I feel like I could have gotten quite a few less commonly used tools by

    ls /usr/bin/|sort -R|head
In my opinion it was a poorly named article with just as poor content. Many of the descriptions of the commands were not good ("lsof: godlike"). Better descriptions could generally even be found automatically:

    man lsof|grep NAME -A1 -m1|tail -n1

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#44

There is dstat missing from the list. It's a tool that shows the information of vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat in a clearer and with colors ;) I use it primarly to see the used bandwidth in real-time. It's better than ifstat for that job.

The man page "See Also" section for dstat is practically a blog post in system monitoring itself.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs User at Work: http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/029/8/3/emacs_user_at...

I still don't get how emacs ever got that image.. I never have to press more than two keys at a time, which is also true for vim..

Well, you never have to, but it can be useful, e.g. with C-M-x instead of M-x eval-defun RET. I've never yet had to bind a chord with more than two meta keys, but considering that even Photoshop has three-meta chords (e.g. C-M-S-s, File/Save for Web...), I don't really see the problem.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#46
It would be very useful to delineate this list by command type and availability. The ones I wanted to check out (ndiff, rs, iftop, mtr, ...) must be in packages, since they don't respond in either OS X or vanilla Debian.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#47

> lsof: godlike Well that's not very useful. Maybe change it to actually say what it does. List open files.

Eh. wget is described as "get w's", which is funny, and it's not as though 'man wget' is a long way away -- even Google knows what to do with that input. The same, I'm sure, is true for 'man lsof'. That being true, I don't see any reason for the author not to indulge in a bit of humor here.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - OS X is Unix(tm), but davexunit's complaint is that the term "Unix commands" implies "commands that will work on all/most UNIX/POSIX systems", not "commands for a single OS that happens also to be a UNIX".

I agree with the complaint too but not only are many of these commands mac only but in addition to that, they are not less commonly used (ex vim). I feel like I could have gotten quite a few less commonly used tools by ls /usr/bin/|sort -R|head In my opinion it was a poorly named article with just as poor content. Many of the descriptions of the commands were not good ("lsof: godlike"). Better descriptions could gene…

You're being that guy.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#49

popd and pushd are commands that, once learned, I thought would change my life forever. Turns out, not so much. :| EDIT: 'watch mtr' is handy for keeping an eye on your network connection, and finding slowdowns.

I aliased `cd` to pushd (squelching output) and `dc` to popd in my interactive shell. It's super handy to have a back button for my shell.

Re: Less Commonly Used Unix Commands

#50
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs User at Work: http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/029/8/3/emacs_user_at...

I still don't get how emacs ever got that image.. I never have to press more than two keys at a time, which is also true for vim..

Then you are doing it wrong. ;)

But seriously: How do you do common things such as `query-replace{-regex}` or `indent-region`? Have you rebound them all?

Post reply on HN