this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025

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378

Which Linux tool or command is surprisingly simple, powerful, and yet underrated?" (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?

This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.

For example I'm surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.

Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

kde connect

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Control+r == search through your bash history.

I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

|

Honorary mention to < and &

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Underrated

Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub

Pick one

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

It has not taken over NGINX and Apache yet.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (2 children)

bc

It's a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (5 children)

yes

The most positive command you'll ever use.

Run it normally and it just spams 'y' from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with 'y'. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that's what this is for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (8 children)

What's the syntax here? Do I go

command && yes

I'm not sure if I've had a use case for it, but it's interesting.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Also my favourite way to push a core to 100% CPU

yes > /dev/null

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Sorry, I should have explained that. it's ~~command | yes~~ yes|command - Eg, yes|apt-get update (Not a great example since apt-get has -y, but sometimes that fails when prompting for new keys to accept)

Edit: I got it backwards, thanks @[email protected] for the correction.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

true delivers error level 0, false error level 1.

yes && echo True || echo False will always be True.

false && echo True || echo False will always be False.

Common usage is for tools that ask for permissions and similiar. yes | cp -i has the same effect as cp --force (-i: prompt before overwrites).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

That will just wait for command to finish properly and then run yes.

What you want to run is yes | command, so it spams the command with confirmations.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

tmsu is pretty cool - it creates a little db and uses that to track tags on your files without ever touching them. It also has it's own little tag based filesystem.

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