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!
- comm
- Finds lines common to two files. The arch-enemy of diff.
- 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.
- par
- A fmt swiss army knife. Better looking formatting (DP instead of Greedy); handles quotations, prefixes, and suffixes; text justification; hanging lines, and so much more!
- paste
- Opposite of cut. Used to create lines from multiple files. Like join, without the need for explicit keys.
- 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.
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