The author mentions App::Ack, but I doubt you'll go back to using `ack` once you've tried The Silver Searcher (`ag`).
A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#22I don't really think it's fair to call anything that's in a POSIX standard obscure (like xargs). Most of these are fairly common, and many of the descriptions are terrible, for example: `rsync` doesn't "[Keep] filesystems in sync over SSH"; it's a versatile `cp`-like for dealing with remote systems efficiently that happens to support transfers over SSH.
As I can no long edit my comment: when I made the parent comment, the title referred to them as _Obscure_ tools.
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#23I know lists like this will almost always contain at least one command that I, or any other sys admin on here, would use fairly regularly. But it would be nice if just once an article about "obscure" CLI commands didn't include stuff that's the most basic of essential every day staples for any *nix administrator.
Including stuff like vi and emacs is just ridiculous, quite frankly. If you haven't heard of them already then you really have no place in the command line, let alone reading a document like this.
Most of these types of articles should be rebanded as "beginners cheat sheet for handy command line tools" or just not written to begin with (because, frankly, they're just repeating all the same recommendations as every other article like this that pops up each week and few of them have any descriptions that are accurate either).
Maybe my job this weekend will be to write my own version of these documents but with a decent selection of programs, descriptions and example usages?
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#24I'd highly recommend checking out httpie as a replacement for curl. I find the interface much more intuitive.
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#25I used remind and wyrd a fair amount before joining Google + switching to google calendar. Remind is really powerful, and wyrd is nice.
Here [0] is a post detailing how I got calendar notifications working with remind/wyrd + screen + URGENT hint.
[0] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/remind-fans/2006/0...
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#26I'm a big fan of Joey Hess' moreutils - https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ Examples: - sponge: read in all of stdin, then write to the given file. Great for pipelines: sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd - vipe: easily drop a $EDITOR instance in the middle of a pipe chain - ts: timestamp all standard input; great for long-running output
How is sponge different from > filename?
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#27I'm a big fan of Joey Hess' moreutils - https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ Examples: - sponge: read in all of stdin, then write to the given file. Great for pipelines: sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd - vipe: easily drop a $EDITOR instance in the middle of a pipe chain - ts: timestamp all standard input; great for long-running output
How is sponge different from > filename?
For one thing, it allows your pipeline to both read from and write to the same file, as it defers the output until there is no more data to read from "upstream". For instance, this won't work (it truncates the file for writing before it is ever read):
grep foo some_file
grep foo Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#28The best not-so-well-known tool he mentiions is socat. If you use netcat, socat is like netcat on steroids. It's just a bit hard to remember all the options, but next time there's something crazy you want to do with netcat that it doesn't support, like tunnelling raw packets from a wireless interface on a machine in firewalled corporate network through an SSL tunnel to home machine and dumping those packets locally t…
I hear nmap's ncat is great as well but I haven't tried it yet. I agree that socat is invaluable, especially when dealing with serial devices.
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#29I don't really think it's fair to call anything that's in a POSIX standard obscure (like xargs). Most of these are fairly common, and many of the descriptions are terrible, for example: `rsync` doesn't "[Keep] filesystems in sync over SSH"; it's a versatile `cp`-like for dealing with remote systems efficiently that happens to support transfers over SSH.
As I can no long edit my comment: when I made the parent comment, the title referred to them as _Obscure_ tools.
Yes, the title of the post on HN is now changed, but the url of the original post still refers to them as "obscure" tools.
Re: A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools
#30For being "obscure", htop manages to find its way into a very large proportion of *NIX screenshots on the web. Not to mention vim, rsync, curl, and ack, all of which I (and I had assumed everyone else) use on a regular basis.
I still don't use ack, mostly because it's not installed everywhere I go on a regular basis and so my fingers still go 'grep' when I think 'text search'.
(I also rarely use curl, because my fingers are trained for wget -qO. That one is a personal quirk, though, I didn't know about curl until I'd had that one imprinted on my brain. The cool thing there, though, is that wget -qSO will send headers to stderr and content to stdout, so you can get fancy.)