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 are little-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! Use your operating system's package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for 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 not tmux is better than screen, is parallel better than xargs, whether or not ifconfig is a power tool, or should this list include somebody's once-used tool for converting old Pascal code to C or something. :)