Cool, but obscure unix tools
Hello, I’m Kristof, a human being like you, and an easy to work with, friendly guy.
I've been a programmer, a consultant, CIO in startups, head of software development in government, and built two software companies.
Some days I’m coding Golang in the guts of a system and other days I'm wearing a suit to help clients with their DevOps practices.
Table of Contents
A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools
Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some arelittle-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure --I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Useyour operating system's package manager to install most of them. (Thanksfor the tips, everybody!)
dstat & sar#
iostat, vmstat, ifstat and much more in one.
slurm#
Visualizes network interface traffic over time.
vim & emacs#
The real programmers editors.
screen, dtach, tmux, byobu#
Keep your terminal sessions alive.
multitail#
See your log files in separate windows.
tpp#
Presentation (PowerPoint") tool for terminal.
xargs & parallel#
Executes tasks from input (even multithread).
duplicity & rsyncrypto#
Encrypting backup tools.
nethack & slash'em#
Still the most complex game on the planet.
lftp#
Does FTPS. Can mirror, kinda like rsync.
ack, ag (silver searcher), pt#
A better grep for source code.
calcurse & remind + wyrd#
Calendar systems.
newsbeuter & rsstail#
Command line RSS readers.
powertop#
Helps conserve power on Linux.
tig#
A console UI for git.
qalc#
The best calculator. Ever. (For scripts too.)
htop, atop & glances#
Process, memory and io monitoring.
ttyrec & ipbt#
Record and play back terminal sessions.
rsync#
Keeps filesystems in sync over SSH.
mtr#
traceroute 2.0.
socat & netpipes#
Directing stuff easily in and out of sockets.
iftop, iptraf & nethogs#
To see where your traffic goes.
siege & tsung#
Command line load test tools.
ledger#
Terminal-based accounting package.
taskwarrior#
Todo management in the terminal.
curl#
Everybodys favorite HTTP toolbox.
rtorrent & aria2#
Command line torrent downloaders.
ttytter & earthquake#
Nice trendy Twitter clients :)
vifm & ranger#
Alternatives to the midnight commander.
cowsay & sl#
I just couldnt resist. :o)
cloc#
Counts lines of code.
ipcalc#
For network assignments.
Discussion of this post on Hacker News ⇐ that's the place to get into nice old-school FidoNet-style flame wars about the important things in life, like whether or nottmux is better thanscreen, isparallel better thanxargs, whether or notifconfig is a power tool, or should this list include somebody's once-used tool for converting old Pascal code to C or something. :)