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.
socat- connect anything to anythingfor example
socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345socat tcp-listen:12345 -socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345Pandoc.
nmap *your_local_ip_address*for example
nmap 192.168.1.43/24will show you what devices are connected to the local network, and what ports are open there. really useful, for example, when you forgot the address of your printer or raspi yet again.you can also use it to understand what ports on your computer are open from an attacker’s perspective, or simply to figure out what services are running (ssh service).
losetupit’s useful for dealing with virtual disk images. like a real physical hard disk, but it’s a file on the computer. you can mount it, format it, and write it to a real physical disk.
it’s sometimes used with virtual machines, with iso images, or when preparing a bootable disk.
netstat -tunlshows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.Not powerful, but often useful,
column -taligns columns in all lines. EG$ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 a5 a10 a9999 a888 bb5 bb10 bb9999 bb888 ccc5 ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888 $ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 | column -t a5 a10 a9999 a888 bb5 bb10 bb9999 bb888 ccc5 ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888Control+r == search through your bash history.
I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.
xargs
Man
probably well known at this point but rsync is incredible and I use it all the time
bcIt’s a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.
batcat
It’s like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.
Oh also, tldr
My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage
jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts
I love jq, but I wouldn’t call it “surprising simple” for anything but pretty-formatting json. It has a fairly steep learning curve for doing anything with all but the simplest operations on the simplest data structures.
ip eg:
# ip a # ip a a 192.168.1.99/24 dev enp160The first incantation - ip address (you can abbreviate whilst it is unambiguous) gets you a quick report of interfaces, MAC, IPs and so on. The second command assigns another IP address to an interface. Handy for setting up devices which don’t do DHCP out of the box or already have an IP and need a good talking to.
Oh and you can completely set up your IP stack, interfaces and routing etc with it. Throw in nft or iptables (old school these days - sigh!) for filtering and other network packet mangling shenanigans.
yesThe most positive command you’ll ever use.
Run it normally and it just spams ‘y’ from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with ‘y’. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that’s what this is for.
