UNIX Commands I Wish I Had Known

There are hundreds upon hundreds of UNIX commands. Most you never encounter in your daily life, most you never know existed. If I had known all of these the day I started, I would have saved myself hours upon hours of writing my own scripts, proggies, etc.

Most of the commands are atomic: designed to take input from stdin and output to stdout. They're useful in pipes, in scripts, called from vim. That's why they're useful. Some are obscure, some aren't.

I wish I had started generating this list as I discovered the useful commands. I guess it's more of a work in progress now, as I use the commands (and remember their existence) I'll add them here. And by all means e-mail me if you have something interesting to add!

cut

This command does it all! Cut a range of characters, a range of fields, output with different delimiters.

fmt

Format text into a certain width, normalize the number of spaces after periods, perform indentation.

sort

Commonly used, but ever so powerful. Fast sorting.

tac

Backwards cat. Prints a file from bottom to top.

tee

Duplicate stdin into both a file and stdout. For extra use, tee on a pipe, or to a device. Display both your output -and- log it.

tr

Trim text. Replace characters, remove characters. Toggle case done easily here.

uniq

Print out only duplicated lines, trims duplicates from stdin! Same as sort -u

watch

Repeatedly monitors the output of a command, e.g. who or ps. Also can be used to periodically run a command.

wget

Fetches a webpage, possibly to standard out with -o -. Useful in shell scripts.