LightProtector
Jerry 🦙💝🦙Ok. Next question: what obscure *nix utility do you love and think everyone should know about?
Colin Dean@jerry apropos is so apropos
webhat@colindean @jerry I used to use this 100s of times a day when I started using a Linux base OS. I loved it. whatis too.
@colindean @jerry info pages were another great resource when I started
lertsenem
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@lertsenem @jerry I’ve run into many folks who are unaware of tree, and it’s super useful!
DefectiveWings ✈️
@lertsenem
Never heard of xtrlock before!
Never heard of xtrlock before!
Tom Larrow@jerry ncdu has saved me so many times, and when I mention it to most folks I get a "what's that?"
shadowdancer
ajk 🫥@jerry jot | rs
hayden aiken 🇺🇲@jerry not obscure, just nearly obsolete I'm sure -- recently I needed to transfer huge directories on small physical media, and the
split command saved my day. It's so brilliantly elegant it almost made me tear. Tarballed my dirs, split the archive by filesize according to my needs, and on the other side cat with redirects recombined everything perfectly.
Kevin Jones@jerry "exa". It's written in rust and is "what if ls was more usable"? https://github.com/ogham/exa
Jeff CaughelI don't know how useful it is but I love that `tac` exists and think everyone should know about it.
It's `cat`, but reads the file from the last line and goes up.
Tanawts@jerry nload and trafshow
@jerry chgrep
daniel (🌮) 
@jerry tldr! cheatsheets for man pages. https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
BsCaBl 
@jerry it's not really obscure but I still use screen a lot. 🤷🏻♂️
Greg Walker 
@bscabl @[email protected] good call. Screen is a fab utility
Sapient@jerry ddate , which tells the discordian date. What i think is most interesting is that it was included as part of util-linux and thus every linux distro from about 1994 till 2011 when the devs made it optional and distros stopped including it by default.
lfisk@jerry nnn for terminal and magicwormhole for sending files.
scottpack@jerry Much to my surprise screen. You can even use it as a terminal emulator for serial connections!
Siguza@jerry just the -V flag to sort(1)
rye@jerry tmux and remmina are my life.
Zac@zachariah @jerry I wished it was on Windows but honestly it just gives me another reason to stick to Linux. Linux has the tools and user experience that I prefer.
Fritz Adalis@FritzAdalis @zachariah @jerry I use it primarily for managing my RDP and SSH connections to remote appliances. Works quite well.
Restic. Cross platform backup utility works over sync and encrypts the backups
Alexandra Lanes
Patrick@jerry bat (cat on steroids) and fd (the better find)
Two that were life-changing for me:
CTRL+R
• search through terminal command history
• https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Searching.html
• tip: press CRTL+R *again* to see each next search result
mysecureshell
• for confined sftp-only access to a system
• https://mysecureshell.readthedocs.io
• features: bandwidth control, only authorized files and folders can be seen by users, advanced logging
runarcn@jerry genact. A command line application that just prints a lot of bullshit to make it look like you do stuff. It's really funny imo.
Karl@jerry tmux is great, and I love ranger as well (although there is this replacement I still have to try out)
dandels
[𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚗𝚎𝚢𝚜𝟷@~/𝚜𝚛𝚌]$
Alexander Bochmann@jerry Everyone uses less, but there's basic commands that few people seem to know about (like &<pattern> to show only matching lines or ?<pattern> to search backwards).
Also, less --follow-name
Sean 🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷@jerry I keep having to show people “man -k <string>” on machines to wide eyed surprise.
jimkats@jerry for me, one of the many useful utilities is qdirstat, with a graphical presentation of disk usage. It's the *nix equivalent of windirstat in Windows.
awk
Jamie Magee 
@jerry sponge soaks up standard input before writing it to a file. It allows you to read from and write to the same file in a pipe.
moreutils has a lot of other really useful tools
Stacey Campbell@jerry mkid/gid/eid/lid from id-utils.
I use them many times a day for Verilog and C.
[nate@social0 ~]$ 
@jerry ‘watch’ so simple. but i use it so much
@jerry
vimtutor, the tutorial that teaches you how to exit it on line 55, if you don't accidentally delete the instruction first!
Sean Riley
0xalivecow@jerry I think I may add "srm". It's like rm but allows you to overwrite files after deletion for better safety.
In addition to that "zoxide". It is a tool that sort of caches paths used with cd and then allows you to go to these paths by just mentioning words contained in them.
Amogh 
Calvin’s IT Toots@jerry Every time I rebuild my primary workstation OS, I always install tmux tmux-pasteboard, imagemagick tesseract, aspell and OpenAI Whisper. These are all an important part of the scripts I use to capture and process meeting notes and dev/test work. It’s SO helpful to be able to grep my meeting notes for key words spoken by clients or seen in PowerPoint presentation screenshots. It’s also way easier to document the procedures I’ve seen or worked through myself.
mr.0ova
Ben Ramsey@jerry `less`
It’s like `more` but better.
And, when looking for a link to explain the differences, I just discovered `most`, which I’ll need to give a try.
Jorge Moran 
Stuart@jerry Others have suggested things like jq (which is a fantastic utility), but I recently discovered fq (aka “jq for binary formats”), and there's no going back now. it's unbelievably convenient for extracting things from binary files using the same sort of syntax as jq.
@jerry
Multitail!
Multitail!
char (#4|2@jerry Llama — a terminal file manager.
I found it very useful to navigate through project structure that I'm not familiar.
Mans R@jerry Not exactly obscure, but people really ought to know that sed can do a lot more than simple regex replacement.
Nop@mansr @jerry sed is apparently turning complete https://catonmat.net/proof-that-sed-is-turing-complete
A Proof That Unix Utility Sed Is Turing Complete
Many people are surprised to learn that `sed`, a seemingly simple text filtering program, is actually Turing complete. This realization prompts the question: how can a text processing utility achieve such computational power? The answer lies in sed's fundamental operations. Essentially, sed functions as a miniature...
