Linux

socat - connect anything to anything

for example

socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

socat tcp-listen:12345 -

socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

ncdu

Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick

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 like https://github.com/aristocratos/btop personally. It's way prettier than the normal top command which you use to watch processes to find the one that's hogging all of the CPU or whatever. And it's not so much that it's underrated so much as it's not very well known or distributed by default.

miniserve

A static file server, I use it for temporary file share in company, just run miniserve . in the folder.

dua

Alternative of du command, run dua i for a text UI

netstat -tunl shows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.

Underrated? I'd say lftp is the best FTP command line client there is. And Midnight Commander is a very very good file browser. I don't see either praised enough.

I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool

• 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

batcat

It's like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.

Oh also, tldr

My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage

I like btop Maybe not really "unknown", but hey for those that don't know about it, check it out!

mlocate

A really simple one but surprisingly useful is cal

tmsu is pretty cool - it creates a little db and uses that to track tags on your files without ever touching them. It also has it's own little tag based filesystem.

awk

..for parsing the output of other commands quickly and simply. Then that parsed output can be used to create simple log messages or be passed as args to other scripts. Powerful.

degit is a tool that will check out a git repo (or a specific branch or commit), but not set it up as a git repo. Basically just downloading a specific commit to a directory.

Pandoc.

all of them

• xargs
• parallel
• PXE (ohai cobbler)
• tee
• task-spooler (ts aka tsp)
• rpm -V

Nothing new, just forgotten.

GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/alternatives/) - handy tool for data munching. There's also https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv