I think a lot of people don't realise that yt-dlp works for many sites, not just YouTube

I used it recently for watching a video from tiktok without having to use their god awful web UI and it was amazing

A few that I use every day:

• Fish shell
• Starship.rs
• Broot (a brilliant filesystem navigator)
• Helix editor (My favorite editor / IDE, truly the successor to vim IMO)
• Topgrade (updates everything)

I use fuck to fix typos

grep goes crazy if you know your regex

jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts

I'm a big fan of screen because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.

I do a lot of work on customers' servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.

The pipe (|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.

Control+r == search through your bash history.

I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.

nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.

Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason.. also hate that vim must be used for certain files.

I find myself using tldr a lot since finding out about it. It's just so useful for commands that I don't use enough to commit to memory.

awk

I know tmux is incredibly popular, but a good use case for it that isn’t common is teaching people how to do things in the terminal. You can both be attached to the same tmux session, and both type into the same shell.

zoxide. It's a fabulous cd replacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you've navigated to a directory, instead of having to type cd /super/long/directory/path, you can type zoxide path and it'll take you right to /super/long/directory/path.

I have it aliased to zd. I love it and install it on every system

You can do things like using a partial directory name and it'll jump you to the closest match in the database. So zoxide pa would take you to /super/long/directory/path.

And you can do partial paths. Say you've got two directories named data in your filesystem.

One at /super/long/directory/path1/data

And the other at /super/long/directory/path2/data

You can do zoxide path2 data and you'll go to /super/long/directory/path2/data

Not powerful, but often useful, column -t aligns 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  ccc888

bc

It's a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.

yes

The 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.

I don't see anyone mentions htop. So, I will:) Just works, could be installed in any distro. Much more friendly than top but isn't bloated with features as some other alternatives are.

Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can cp -g to see progress. Set an alias :)

CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!

Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn't as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.

pipeviewer or pv

Man

I love ncdu for seeing where all my storage is being taken up.

dd is probably well known, but one of the simplest and most powerful ways to accidentally delete all data on your hard drive. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

Discovered about rg recently and it is cool!

socat - connect anything to anything

for example

socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

socat tcp-listen:12345 -

socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

sshfs

I'm not sure how underrated it is but the exec feature in find is so useful, there are so many bulk tasks that would just be incredibly difficult otherwise but instead are just one line

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

ncdu

I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool

xargs

probably well known at this point but rsync is incredible and I use it all the time

• xargs
• parallel
• PXE (ohai cobbler)
• tee
• task-spooler (ts aka tsp)
• rpm -V

Nothing new, just forgotten.

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

kde connect

Underrated? I'd say lftp is the best FTP command line client there is. And Midnight Commander is a very very good file browser. I don't see either praised enough.

A really simple one but surprisingly useful is cal

I like https://github.com/aristocratos/btop personally. It's way prettier than the normal top command which you use to watch processes to find the one that's hogging all of the CPU or whatever. And it's not so much that it's underrated so much as it's not very well known or distributed by default.

netstat -tunl shows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.

miniserve

A static file server, I use it for temporary file share in company, just run miniserve . in the folder.

dua

Alternative of du command, run dua i for a text UI

awk

..for parsing the output of other commands quickly and simply. Then that parsed output can be used to create simple log messages or be passed as args to other scripts. Powerful.

• awk
• the (usually rust-based) coreutils "alternatives" like bat, fd, eza, procs
• trash-put (rm with trash integration. But beware that it also operates on directories by default, which rm only does with -r. There should be an option to change that behavior but there isn't. Don't alias rm to this)
• wl-copy/paste (or the older one for X11, 'xclip' IIRC. Enables you to do stuff like "cat image.jpg | wl-copy" to copy it to the clipboard. Best alias it to something shorter)
• xdg-open (open the file using your associated program for that file type. Alias to "o" or so)
• pass (awesome password manager, when you have a GPG key pair. Even better in combination with e.g. wofi)
• notify-send (to send GUI notifications from shell scripts)
• ledger (plain-text accounting software. If you use Emacs you should take a look at this as it's written by an Emacs dev, and has good integration of course)
• nc
• nohup

mlocate

I like btop Maybe not really "unknown", but hey for those that don't know about it, check it out!

Pandoc.

Idk a lot of commands but I think wget for downloading webpages and rsync for syncing devices are pretty awesome

all of them

Underrated

Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub

Pick one

find?

Underrated or not widely known?

I love lazygit and I'm still surprised at how many people are shocked when they see it for the first time. Not exactly a command, but a very handy text UI tool.

For more elementary tools, I can't believe how many people know about ! and ctrl+r who don't also know about fc and edit-and-execute-command.

degit is a tool that will check out a git repo (or a specific branch or commit), but not set it up as a git repo. Basically just downloading a specific commit to a directory.

motion

After spending years dealing with shady freeware and junk software on windows, I was floored by how easy and nonchalantly I was able to set up a simple security camera on my PC

Lightweight sudo alternatives, hard to google too. I know ssu and rdo, please mention others.

Bat, a cat alternative.

Lsd, an ls alternative.

Procs, a ps alternative.

Renane, because it's great.

People always sleep on script. It's badass and let's you do goofy things like this while keeping standard terminal formatting: https://github.com/StaticRocket/dotfiles/blob/043e9a56cc9515060188ec4642e4048c0dd6c000/dot_bashrc#L79-L94

GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/alternatives/) - handy tool for data munching. There's also https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

+1 to caddy. There are some services that set safe headers following the recommendations outlined by Mozilla but others don't control headers as strictly. Caddy is the only web server that I found that supports loose default header values. These values will be selected unless the upstream application specifies their own values.

You can do something similar in nginx but it requires playing with maps and has a little more indirection than I'd like.

Just wish caddy was capable of starting as root and stepping down permissions like Nginx. I have certs being managed by other tools and have to make sure they are installed and chowned for caddy's use when they are cycled.

watch -g

As someone who has to do installs and admin at work a lot I'm constantly dealing with yum/dnf. I cry when I have to work with AIX.

ip eg:

# ip a
# ip a a 192.168.1.99/24 dev enp160

The 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.

nmap *your_local_ip_address*

for example

nmap 192.168.1.43/24 will 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).

edir, can use GUI editors too.

On the subject of editors, joe is just awesome: lightweight, powerful, had coffee coloring and line numbers, and you can choose it with Ctrl+C:)

Inshellisense is teaching me a lot. :) It's an autocompleter.

https://github.com/microsoft/inshellisense

Also, Atuin for history.

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

glances! Way better than top and does a bazillion cool things!

https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/

yes

paste. I don't think a lot of people know this command, but it can be handy at times

losetup

it'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.

I abused debfoster for years... it kept my machines running very, very clean.

Most listed in some form elsewhere, but

• Ugrep
• ranger/lf
• tmux (splitting terminal and detatching/reattaching when I'm sshing onto server, etc)

I've also been enjoying Kate. It's a decent text editor, but the ability to Ctrl + / to pipe selected lines through any Linux command (Uniq, shuf, etc) is a bit of a superpower for an editor

pdfgrep for the well maintained company's project folder of your choice.

I use node as a calculator a lot. It can be dangerous, because it suffers from floating point errors, but it’s generally more powerful than a calculator if you know the Math lib well.

inxi saves you time 90% of the time that you would use for lsXXX commands and grepping. Really useful for quick hardware and kernel module checks.

The mouse.

Bring on the downvotes. 🎉