A unix question i periodically ask:
What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro? Why?
I've got jq, pandoc, tldr and a few others on my list, but I'd love to know others; boosts appreciated.
@mhoye I'd say sponge, pv, ts, and vipe. All these except pv are "moreutils".
Sponge buffers stdin, writing it to stdout or a file on EOF. Neat for overwriting a file in-place. E.g. `shuf file | sponge file`
Pv is like cat, but with a "progress bar". E.g. `pv file | nc ...`
Ts is like cat but it timestamps each line. E.g. `ts >> diary`
Vipe is like cat, but it lets you text-edit data as it flows through. E.g. `vipe > somefifo`
How about nc & nmap? ;)
I also use upower a fair bit for a little more info than acpi provides, and zathura, nsxiv, and qutebrowser/luakit are honorable mentions as GUI apps that are completely keyboard-navigable and basically act like less or vim.
Also, pip is super useful for installing/upgrading python packages, although it's increasingly pre-installed on unixes.
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rfkill is helpful for turning on/off wifi/bt from the commandline, and I'm a little ticked that I have to install ifconfig manually these days :P
Oh, also rclone and syncthing. Crazy useful, both of them.
zstd is increasingly pre-installed, but I always install it if it isn't.
Oh, and of course tut and toot for command-line Mastodon goodness (along with my "tootme" script!: https://codeberg.org/rldane/scripts/src/branch/main/tootme)
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@golemwire
Wow, bookmarked! I knew about pv, but the others sound awesome.
I'd add ccrypt off the top of my head. Super-simple AES crypto tool. I've used it in production in a past life.
I'll see if I can remember more when sitting in front of an actual prompt. 😅
@mhoye