I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick
FFMpeg Simple and underrated? Not sure about that.
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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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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Find
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.
I'd like to interject for a moment. There is also a tool called bat that is just cat with extra features. It prints out and works just like cat, but when the contents get too big, it works like less. The is syntax highlighting and works with git.
It's replaced my need for cat and less.
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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.
GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/alternatives/) - handy tool for data munching. There's also https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv
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- 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
paste. I don't think a lot of people know this command, but it can be handy at times