I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
378 points (98.2% liked)
Linux
49069 readers
390 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
- awk
- the (usually rust-based) coreutils "alternatives" like bat, fd, eza, procs
- trash-put (rm with trash integration. But beware that it also operates on directories by default, which rm only does with -r. There should be an option to change that behavior but there isn't. Don't alias rm to this)
- wl-copy/paste (or the older one for X11, 'xclip' IIRC. Enables you to do stuff like "cat image.jpg | wl-copy" to copy it to the clipboard. Best alias it to something shorter)
- xdg-open (open the file using your associated program for that file type. Alias to "o" or so)
- pass (awesome password manager, when you have a GPG key pair. Even better in combination with e.g. wofi)
- notify-send (to send GUI notifications from shell scripts)
- ledger (plain-text accounting software. If you use Emacs you should take a look at this as it's written by an Emacs dev, and has good integration of course)
- nc
- nohup
batcat
It's like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.
Oh also, tldr
My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage
load more comments
(1 replies)
netstat -tunl shows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.
netstat is kind of deprecated, ss is more modern (from the iproute2 package) and uses very similar parameters.
Underrated? I'd say lftp is the best FTP command line client there is. And Midnight Commander is a very very good file browser. I don't see either praised enough.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Also useful in this regard, python comes with a sìmple file server built in, python -m http.server --directory /dir/ would serve /dir/ on port 8000.
I like btop personally. It's way prettier than the normal top command which you use to watch processes to find the one that's hogging all of the CPU or whatever. And it's not so much that it's underrated so much as it's not very well known or distributed by default.
awk
..for parsing the output of other commands quickly and simply. Then that parsed output can be used to create simple log messages or be passed as args to other scripts. Powerful.
awk and sed have always been intimidating for me with that cryptic syntax.
I agree with your sentiment regarding confusing syntax, however I think that confusion simply requires a calculated approach to dispell it.
It's a prime example of why I use scripts as reminders as much as I use them functionally. I work out the syntax once.. save it to an example script, then save myself 20 minutes of remembering by just $ cat ./path/to/script.sh and copying said syntax.
So if you can change your workflow such that learned things stay around as examples, I feel that you will pick it up much more quickly :)
Underrated
Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub
Pick one
load more comments
(1 replies)
Idk a lot of commands but I think wget for downloading webpages and rsync for syncing devices are pretty awesome
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/alternatives/) - handy tool for data munching. There's also https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv
load more comments
(1 replies)
all of them
Bat, a cat alternative.
Lsd, an ls alternative.
Procs, a ps alternative.
Renane, because it's great.
load more comments
(3 replies)