Cool, but obscure unix tools

Depends who you ask, I suppose - I come from sysadmin world so none of these are obscure for me. So I'd say they are mainly less popular with the 'average Joe' user base. Judging by the screenshots, the author seems to be coming from Mac world, where GUI editors appear more popular than vim.

Re: Cool, but obscure unix tools

#6

Post by cyphax » Mon, Jan 12, 2015, 8:47 AM UTC

I'll quote myself from an earlier thread of a similar list of awesome tools; this one deserves to be in it so much:

An ncurses disk usage analyzer: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

I find this an extremely handy alternative to du, it's somewhat similar to TreeView on Windows.

Re: Cool, but obscure unix tools

#7

Post by drinkyouroj » Mon, Jan 12, 2015, 8:57 AM UTC

cyphax wrote: post #6

I'll quote myself from an earlier thread of a similar list of awesome tools; this one deserves to be in it so much: An ncurses disk usage analyzer: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu I find this an extremely handy alternative to du, it's somewhat similar to TreeView on Windows.

This tool is a must-have for any on-call sysadmin.

Re: Cool, but obscure unix tools

#8

Post by dozzie » Mon, Jan 12, 2015, 10:59 AM UTC

drinkyouroj wrote: post #7

cyphax wrote: post #6

I'll quote myself from an earlier thread of a similar list of awesome tools; this one deserves to be in it so much: An ncurses disk usage analyzer: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu I find this an extremely handy alternative to du, it's somewhat similar to TreeView on Windows.

This tool is a must-have for any on-call sysadmin.

Must-have? Hardly. It's much easier to run `du -sm | sort -n', both of which are already installed everywhere along with coreutils.

Re: Cool, but obscure unix tools

#9

Post by drinkyouroj » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 3:13 AM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #8

drinkyouroj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tool is a must-have for any on-call sysadmin.

Must-have? Hardly. It's much easier to run `du -sm | sort -n', both of which are already installed everywhere along with coreutils.

Fair enough; "must-have" is a bit strong. But, when I'm responding to a freespace alert on one of 2000-300 servers I've never seen before, the "visualized" data layout is easier to digest than a list of numbers - plus ncdu can drill-down through a directory tree quite nicely.