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Modern Linux tools

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Re: Modern Linux tools

#111

Post by w0m »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #55
lucasoshiro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that if you ever change your OS installation apt-get/pacman/dnf/brew install You'll need install those and other tools (your favorite browser, you favorite text editor, etc) anyway if you're changing your OS. > or SSH anywhere When you connect through SSH you don't have GUI and that's not a reason for avoiding using GUI tools, for example. > even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones e…

> You'll need install those and other tools (your favorite browser, you favorite text editor, etc) anyway if you're changing your OS. The point is that sometimes you're SSHing to a lightweight headless server or something and you can't (or can't easily) install software.

Because 'sometimes' doesn't mean you should needlessly handcuf yourself the other 80% of the time.

I personally haves an ansible playbook to ~setup all my commonly used tooling on ~any cli I will use significantly; (almost) all local installs to avoid need for root. It runs in ~minute - and I have all the Niceties. If it's not worth spending that minute to run; then i won't be on the machine long enough for it to matter.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#112

Post by jauntywundrkind »

0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I indeed would not want to feel stranded with a bespoke toolkit. But I also don't think shying away from good tools is the answer. Generally I think using better tools is the way to go.

Often there are plenty of of paths open to getting a decent environment as you go:

Mostly, I rely on ansible scripts to install and configure the tools I use.

One fallback I haven't seen mentioned, that can get a lot of mileage from it: use sshfs to mount the target system locally. This allows you to use local tool & setup effectively against another machine!

Re: Modern Linux tools

#113

Post by lucasoshiro »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #55
lucasoshiro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that if you ever change your OS installation apt-get/pacman/dnf/brew install You'll need install those and other tools (your favorite browser, you favorite text editor, etc) anyway if you're changing your OS. > or SSH anywhere When you connect through SSH you don't have GUI and that's not a reason for avoiding using GUI tools, for example. > even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones e…

> You'll need install those and other tools (your favorite browser, you favorite text editor, etc) anyway if you're changing your OS. The point is that sometimes you're SSHing to a lightweight headless server or something and you can't (or can't easily) install software.

That's a niche case. And if you need to frequently SSH into a lightweight server you'll probably will be ok with the default commands even though you have the others installed in the local setup.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#114

Post by w0m »

kombine wrote: post #38
0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I started a new job and spent maybe a day setting up the tools and dotfiles on my development machine in the cloud. I'm going to keep it throughout my employment so it's worth the investment. And I install most of the tools via nix package manager so I don't have to compile things or figure out how to install them on a particular Linux distribution. L

Learn Ansible or similar, and you you can be ~OS (OSX/Linux/even Windows) agnostic with relatively complex setups. I set mine up before Agentic systems were as good as they are now; but I assume it would be relatively effortless now.

IMO, it's worth spending some time to clean up your setup for smooth transition to new machines in the future.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#115

Post by Johanx64 »

antegamisou wrote: post #92
Otek wrote: post #4

This is 2023 article. As with most “modern tools” half of them probably already have some newer, shinier and more trendy replacements

I find the opposite to be true. Most of these are really just reinventing the wheel of foundational GNU tools that are really powerful provided one has spent some time on them.

It's like people dont even know why people use or want these "modern" tools. It's called "sane defaults", and improved UX.

Those "foundational GNU tools" just suck, sure, people are familiar with them and they are everywhere, but they just plain suck.

For many common operations you'd want to do by default with grep/find and so on, you have to type mountains of random gibberish to get it done. And that random gibberish isn't something that rolls of your tongue either, thus at minimum you'd define truckload of aliases.

OR you can use a tool(s) that has marginally "sane defaults" and marginally sane UX out of the box.

It really isn't that complicated. This has nothing to do with "rust".

Re: Modern Linux tools

#116

Post by MontyCarloHall »

HankStallone wrote: post #78
robenkleene wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how would you recursively grep files ignoring (hidden files [e.g., `.git`]), only matching a certain file extension? (E.g., `rg -g '*.foo' bar`.) I use the command line a lot too and this is one of my most common commands, and I don't know of an elegant way to do it with the builtin Unix tools. (And I have basically the same question for finding files matching a regex or glob [ignoring the stuff I o…

find . -type f -name '*.foo' -not -path '*/.*' -print0 | xargs -0 grep bar

The one issue with this approach is that it would still traverse all hidden folders, which could be expensive (e.g. in a git repo with an enormous revision history in `.git/`). `-not -path ...` just prevents entities from being printed, not being traversed. To actually prevent traversal, you need to use `-prune`.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#117

Post by 0x696C6961 »

samtrack2019 wrote: post #104
kokada wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I really like Nix, my setup works basically everywhere (as long the host OS is either Linux or macOS, but those are the only 2 environments that I care). I don't even need root access to install Nix since there are multiple ways to install Nix rootless. But yes, in the eventual case that I don't have Nix I can very much use the classic tools. It is not a binary choice, you can have both.

are you going to install nix in a random docker container?

mise is a good middle ground.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#118

Post by zdc1 »

twic wrote: post #93
sigio wrote: post #68

As someone who logs into hundreds of servers in various networks, from various customers/clients, there is so little value in using custom tooling, as they will not be available on 90% of the systems. I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet. 95% of the systems I…

"servers" is the key word here. Some of the tools listed on that page are just slightly "improved" versions of common sysadmin utilities, and indeed, those are probably not worth it. But some are really development tools, things that you'd install on the small number of machines where you do programming. Those might be. The ones that leap out at me are ripgrep (a genuinely excellent recursive grepper), jq (a JSON pro…

In my last role rg and jq were included as part of our standard AMI as well as our base container images. It broadens our CVE exposure but it was undoubtably worth it.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#119

Post by Gracana »

112233 wrote: post #84
0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

Never will I ever set up tools and home environment directly on the distro. Only in a rootfs that I can proot/toolbx/bwrap into. Not only I don't want to set up again on different computer, distro upgrade has nuked "fancy" tools enough times to be not worth it.

https://proot-me.github.io/

Wow, that is so cool. This looks a lot more approachable than other sandboxing tools.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#120

Post by e3bc54b2 »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #75
sigio wrote: post #68

As someone who logs into hundreds of servers in various networks, from various customers/clients, there is so little value in using custom tooling, as they will not be available on 90% of the systems. I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet. 95% of the systems I…

Another reason emacs as an OS (not fully, but you know) is such a great way to get used to things you have on systems. Hence the quote: "GNU is my operating system, linux is just the current kernel". As a greybeard linux admin, I agree with you though. This is why when someone tells me they are learning linux the first thing I tell them is to just type "info" into the terminal and read the whole thing, and that will…

> we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default

What are you talking about? I'm still living those days in modern day AWS with latest EC2 machines!

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