Let's make a list of our favorite CLI utilities.

3 years ago by chaoticAnimals to c/commandline

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Any extra tips or tricks are welcome!

Yesterday I learned that set -x enables trace for a bash, sh, or zsh script and prints the trace to the terminal.

mug9145 6 points 3 years ago

Newsboat, an RSS reader https://newsboat.org/

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chaoticAnimals 1 point 3 years ago

Interesting :)

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sisyphean 5 points 3 years ago

I really like jless. You can pipe the JSON output of a cURL command into it and it displays it in a really nice, easy to read way with collapsible arrays and objects.

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sirnak 2 points 3 years ago

Why haven't I heard of this before?? Absolute gamechanger o_O

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Algae 4 points 3 years ago

My answers (mostly running in powershell - not that it makes much of a difference!)

Rust-based utilities I couldn't live without:

fd (fd-find) for finding my files
rg (ripgrep) for string searches
sd (sed) for search and replace
dust (dust) for information about my directories
lsd (aliased to ls or l) for replacing Dir
bat (better cat) - for when the help pages are too long

Other stuff I love:

htop - I just learned you can run this in WSL to see all your system cores. It's pretty!
nvim - obviously. The best vim. Even works in VSCode

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mim 4 points 3 years ago

Taskwarrior.

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FiveAcres 4 points 3 years ago

In Bash, I like to use cdargs

sudo apt-get install cdargs

It allows you to set up shortcuts on the fly,

cv sdbackup

rather than cd /media/user/Backup Plus/ MyFiles/current/sdbackup

cv with no argument will give you a list to select from current shortcuts

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dark776174657273 1 point 3 years ago

Of those mentioned, this one intrigues me most. Thanks!

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attn_dfct_dev 4 points 3 years ago

scoop - closest to apt on Windows
yt-dlp - active fork of youtube-dl
neofetch - System information display
winfetch - Same as neofetch, but for windows
pandoc - Ultimate converter
ffmpeg - must have tool
taskwarrior - best task manager imho

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RandomDevOpsDude 3 points 3 years ago

I write a lot of bash scripts that end up running in automation in some fashion.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euxo pipefail

Is pretty standard for me.

-e exit on error

-o pipefail exit on pipeline fail

-u error on unset variables

-x trace

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fallenpixel 3 points 3 years ago

Always partial to yq and jq. No easier way to interact with kubernetes outputs on the fly.

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Andy 2 points 3 years ago

I don't know about k8s work in particular, but I enjoy jello and yamlpath more than jq and yq.

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nevalem 2 points 3 years ago

Don't forget about fq!

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RandomDevOpsDude 2 points 3 years ago

How I have never heard of yq, I'm unsure, but thank you as I'm sure it will make life easier

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chaoticAnimals 2 points 3 years ago

I'm a pretty big fan of icdiff. This utility allows you to compare two files to see what has been added or removed by using colorful fonts to highlight values.

https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff

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Andy 3 points 3 years ago

Another good one is riff (riffdiff on crates.io).

EDIT: for single-column view, that is

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cd_slash_rmrf 0 points 3 years ago

I recently learned about diffsitter which uses tree-sitter for meaningful diffs

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gamma 2 points 3 years ago

pv, which is like cat, simply copying files or stdin to stdout, but prints statistics to the terminal.

A related tip: dd isn't special in the way most people use it. This works too, if you're root: pv my-fav-distro.iso > /dev/sdc

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