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.

    • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      5 days ago

      Just commenting to give more love to helix. It’s my favorite “small quick edits” editor.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 days ago

      I’ve actually been testing with fish recently coming from zsh, though I might wait until 4.0 fully releases before I make a more conclusive decision to move or not.

      With that said, I remember looking through omf themes and stumbled onto Starship that branched off one of the themes and really liked the concept.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    5 days ago

    I’m a big fan of screen because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.

    I do a lot of work on customers’ servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        4·
        5 days ago

        Tmux / Screen is like the emacs/vim of the modern day Linux I think.

        Screen is more than capable, but for those who have moved to Tmux, they will absolutely advocate for it.

    • surfrock66@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      I know everyone likes tmux but screen is phenomenal. I have a .screenrc I deploy everywhere with a statusbar at the bottom, a set number of pre-defined tabs, and logging to a directory (which is cleaned up after 30 days) so I can go back and figure out what I did. Great tool.

    • villainy@lemmy.world
      4·
      5 days ago

      Woah screen is seeing active development again? There was like a decade where it stagnated. So much so that different distros were packaging different custom feature patches (IIRC only Ubuntu had a vertical split patch by default?) Looking at it now, the new screen maintainers had to skip a version to not conflict with forks that had become popular.

      When tmux stabilized I jumped ship immediately and never looked back.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
    7·
    5 days ago

    I like https://github.com/aristocratos/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.

  • stembolts@programming.dev
    5·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • mfat@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      5 days ago

      awk and sed have always been intimidating for me with that cryptic syntax.

      • stembolts@programming.dev
        4·
        5 days ago

        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 :)

  • SteelyWing@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 days ago

    miniserve

    A static file server, I use it for temporary file share in company, just run miniserve . in the folder.

    dua

    Alternative of du command, run dua i for a text UI

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
    3·
    5 days ago

    zoxide. It’s a fabulous cd replacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you’ve navigated to a directory, instead of having to type cd /super/long/directory/path, you can type zoxide path and it’ll take you right to /super/long/directory/path.

    I have it aliased to zd. I love it and install it on every system

    You can do things like using a partial directory name and it’ll jump you to the closest match in the database. So zoxide pa would take you to /super/long/directory/path.

    And you can do partial paths. Say you’ve got two directories named data in your filesystem.

    One at /super/long/directory/path1/data

    And the other at /super/long/directory/path2/data

    You can do zoxide path2 data and you’ll go to /super/long/directory/path2/data

  • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 days ago

    I’m not sure how underrated it is but the exec feature in find is so useful, there are so many bulk tasks that would just be incredibly difficult otherwise but instead are just one line

  • helmet91@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 days ago

    Use less for checking contents of files. Many people use cat all the time, but I don’t like it, because if you do that often, your terminal window quickly gets flooded with stuff, and then you have to scroll up and down if you wanna see a previous output. With less, your file opens in a different “frame”, which you can close when you’re done.