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.

  • Boomer Humor DoomergodEnglish
    40•1 year ago

    I’m a big fan of screen because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.

    I do a lot of work on customers’ servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.

    • @[email protected]English
      17•1 year ago

      I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”

      • @[email protected]
        12•1 year ago

        Tmux / Screen is like the emacs/vim of the modern day Linux I think.

        Screen is more than capable, but for those who have moved to Tmux, they will absolutely advocate for it.

    • gkak.laₛEnglish
      15•1 year ago

      There is also zellij, which can do the same but also has modern functionality specific for development workspaces!

      (Although screen or tmux will still probably be more widely available on remote machines etc)

    • surfrock66English
      8•1 year ago

      I know everyone likes tmux but screen is phenomenal. I have a .screenrc I deploy everywhere with a statusbar at the bottom, a set number of pre-defined tabs, and logging to a directory (which is cleaned up after 30 days) so I can go back and figure out what I did. Great tool.

    • @[email protected]
      7•1 year ago

      Woah screen is seeing active development again? There was like a decade where it stagnated. So much so that different distros were packaging different custom feature patches (IIRC only Ubuntu had a vertical split patch by default?) Looking at it now, the new screen maintainers had to skip a version to not conflict with forks that had become popular.

      When tmux stabilized I jumped ship immediately and never looked back.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        I’ve had nohup fail to keep things running after my session ended quite frequently. It’s like it just goes to the next step in the process then gives up.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 year ago

          It’s likely that you’re using a systemd based system and the admin hasn’t enabled linger for your user.

          • @[email protected]
            1•1 year ago

            The servers are very locked down, so I’m sure that’s part of our compliance requirements. I haven’t looked into fixing it because I just wrote a script to hit Enter every 10 minutes to keep it alive.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        It’s not as useful, sadly. Nohup disconnects standard input, output, and error. With screen or tmux, you can reattach them later.