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.
121·7 days ago- 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