Useful nix utilities

Orion · 17-08-2008 01:22PM #1

Might be handy as a sticky if people contribute. Basically useful little utilities that you can't live without once you start using them.

I'll get the ball rolling:

Yakuake (in Debian repos): Terminal which scrolls down from top of screen a la Quake terminal. It's for KDE but works fine in Gnome too. Handy for kicking things off and scrolling back up to leave them running out of the way.
mrxvt: Multi-tabbed terminal. DE independant.
Notecase: hierarchical note manager. Quite simply brilliant.

liamo · 17-08-2008 07:47PM

screen

A marvelous little utility that allows you to detach from a running session while leaving it running in the background.

Particularly useful if you're working on a remote machine with dodgy internet. If your ssh session gets disconnected - no problem. Reconnect when it comes back and simply re-attach to your still-running session.

Khannie · 18-08-2008 09:45AM

for loops!

for i in *; do echo "filename is $i"; done

larryone · 18-08-2008 05:14PM

I used to use screen all the time.

reverse history search in bash.
Ctrl-r and type in a couple of characters. Ctrl-r again for the next match, etc...

FruitLover · 18-08-2008 05:48PM

++ for yakuake and screen. There's a Gnome-oriented equivalent of yakuake called 'tilda' if you don't want to have to install konsole etc, but IMO yakuake works better.

syklops · 19-08-2008 05:07PM

Useful nix utilities?

All of nix is useful utilities!!!

Anyhoo, screen++, also for yakuake, though I have the habit of using alt + Tab, for manouvering windows, and alt + tab seems to get confused with yakuake.

After years of using RPM I have to add apt to this list. It is just fantastic! I don't understand why other distro's waste time trying to invent new package managers when apt works so well.

Using the tunneling feature of ssh is also very cool.

Thats all I can think of short of just listing the contents of /bin

Khannie · 19-08-2008 06:36PM

freenx / nx (www.nomachine.com). Absolutely savage remote desktop application. Using it right now to write this.

Skrynesaver · 26-08-2008 05:04PM

First Yakuake is definitely the business and while others have recomended yum, I tend to agree on the apt tools, never happier since I switched from RPM, but that may be me not staying current as new tools became available.

So if I can't have Perl does Vim count ? (see subject)

Wget for generating local documentation and generally just mirroring stuff

imageMagick's convert in particular for batch processing files

And loads I've forgotten about, for inspiration take a look at the Debian package of the day site

Orion · 27-08-2008 01:05AM

What's the edit limit on posts? Thought it was a month and was going to edit the first post to include the others listed. Forgot about ImageMagick - it does kick ass. And FreeNX is fantastic for remote desktop.

Like that Package of the Day site. Today's is EasyTag - for batch manipulating ID3 tags - me likey. That'll be added to my RSS reader

Capt'n Midnight · 28-08-2008 12:23AM

testdisk saved my partitions more than once and it includes photorec

FruitLover · 03-09-2008 12:31PM

Nmap and netcat are two utilities I use pretty much every day (particularly nc)

Does rsync count?

Capt'n Midnight · 03-09-2008 08:19PM

ddrescue

bc -l
scale 1000
a(1)*4

Useful nix utilities

Welcome!

Comments

Welcome!