this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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.

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[–] bbbhltz@beehaw.org 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 10 points 5 days ago (3 children)

FFMpeg Simple and underrated? Not sure about that.

[–] menas@lemmy.wtf 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I was surprise to learn that we couldn't remove remove metadata from video zith exiftool but have to use ffmpeg

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[–] turbowafflz@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] lig@lemmings.world 10 points 4 days ago (5 children)

A really simple one but surprisingly useful is cal

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[–] helmet91@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Use less for checking contents of files. Many people use cat all the time, but I don't like it, because if you do that often, your terminal window quickly gets flooded with stuff, and then you have to scroll up and down if you wanna see a previous output. With less, your file opens in a different "frame", which you can close when you're done.

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[–] SteelyWing@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 8 points 4 days ago

Also useful in this regard, python comes with a sìmple file server built in, python -m http.server --directory /dir/ would serve /dir/ on port 8000.

[–] learnbyexample@programming.dev 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)
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[–] kyub@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 5 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
[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 days ago
[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

[–] killabeezio@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago

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

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