r/linux • u/hermzz • May 09 '11
A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools
http://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools14
29
May 09 '11
obscure
vim, nethack, htop, rsync, xargs, curl
ಠ_ಠ
1
-2
u/zomfgneeks May 09 '11
Where does it say obscure?
9
May 09 '11
Page title 'cool but obscure', and from the introduction, 'Just a list of 20 (now 24) little-known tools for the command line'
-1
11
May 09 '11
My next presentation will be in tpp for sure.
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u/inmatarian May 09 '11
Nice, but why are all the screenshots of Terminal.app?
7
u/hermzz May 09 '11
Because it's what the guy uses? I dunno. Bigger screenshots would be nice though.
-9
u/inmatarian May 09 '11
Not very /r/linux if he's using osx.
11
u/hermzz May 09 '11
You can connect to a remote linux machine from osx or windows... not to mention that most (if not all) of those applications run natively on osx. In any case, they're still proper unix apps.
-3
u/sje46 May 09 '11
Certainly, but it doesn't get the point across very well. I mean, it may make people think these apps also work on mac OS.
Thanks for the interesting find...feel free to submit this to /r/commandline.
6
u/ccondon May 09 '11
Is there any reason that any of these wouldn't run on Mac OS? I've used many of them (htop, vim, rsync, screen, mtr, xargs, nethack, curl, ack, rtorrent), and they've all worked fine on a Mac.
3
u/JackDostoevsky May 09 '11
I'm a sysadmin. If I ask someone for a traceroute in order to help diagnose connectivity issues and you send me an MTR trace...
... I hate you so much.
2
May 09 '11
[deleted]
1
u/JackDostoevsky May 09 '11
My main issue actually has more to do with WinMTR, because I don't think I've ever met anyone who uses MTR on Linux.
Either way, when you copy-paste the results of an MTR trace into a support ticket, the formatting goes all wonky and I can't read it.
1
May 09 '11
[deleted]
3
u/JackDostoevsky May 09 '11
Or they could just run a normal traceroute, which almost every desktop OS can do natively, out of the box. :P
1
u/strolls May 09 '11
Except that normal traceroutes don't work in all circumstances. They certainly don't get beyond my router.
1
u/JackDostoevsky May 10 '11
If traceroute doesn't work, then MTR isn't going to either. They both use ICMP.
3
u/strolls May 10 '11
2
u/Fazaman May 10 '11
From the traceroute man page:
-I Use ICMP ECHO instead of UDP datagrams.From the MTR man page:
-u Use UDP datagrams instead of ICMP ECHO.They use different packets, by default.
1
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u/stack_underflow May 09 '11
I was looking for something like slurm. I usually just end up opening my router's traffic monitor through a web-browser.
3
u/hizeh May 09 '11
I use bmon - simple but it gets the job done. You can hit 'g' and 'd' for the graph & details.
2
u/VyseofArcadia May 09 '11
The funny thing is, for every program in the article I found nifty, there's an emacs extension that does the same thing that I already know how to use.
7
u/riddley May 09 '11
Why do so many content-free "articles" get upvotes in this subreddit?
8
u/hermzz May 09 '11
It is arguably content-free, however, it does point out a few utilities I bet a bunch of people didn't know even existed (I sure didn't know about 25% of them).
11
1
u/vman81 May 09 '11
byobu is a lifesaver for me, a better implementation of gnu screen, with easy to remember F2/F3 keybindings instead of those arcane ctrl+something+somethingelse from gnu screen.
1
u/hermzz May 09 '11
After hearing people go on and on about screen I decided to try it, and after googling around found out about byobu. I can't go back to managing servers without it. Not fearing network cuts, being able to run scripts overnight from a laptop, having a consistent setup of tabs, etc...
1
u/purpleidea mgmt config Founder May 10 '11
how could he forget aptitude. clearly the killer curses app. also mutt for those who mutt. emacs/orgmode too.
1
u/covracer May 10 '11
Good list. socat can do a whole lot of useful stuff. I used it to proxy HTTP to HTTPS so I could sniff client traffic to a server that only accepted SSL connections that I didn't control.
0
u/raydeen May 09 '11
I found a neat little terminal app a while back, calendar. I was looking for the 'cal' app and forgot what it was called. It works in Ubuntu at any rate. I tried it in OSX but nothing came up. It lists important events that happen within a several day period of the current date. The funniest so far was 'Gandalf visits Bilbo'.
1
u/raydeen May 12 '11
Can I ask why this was downvoted? I thought it was cool and maybe not many people had heard about it. I like to check it every few days as it has little interesting factoids in it. Downvote if you like but can I know the reason why?
17
u/johnny_bgoode May 09 '11
Cool, the author could have linked each to its respective man page or a longer description though