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.

  • DigitalDilemmaEnglish
    26·
    3 days ago

    yes

    The most positive command you’ll ever use.

    Run it normally and it just spams ‘y’ from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with ‘y’. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that’s what this is for.

    • alvendam@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 days ago

      What’s the syntax here? Do I go

      command && yes

      I’m not sure if I’ve had a use case for it, but it’s interesting.

          • valkyre09@lemmy.world
            3·
            2 days ago

            Who said it was better? It’s just my favourite.

            Like my favourite shirt, it’s no better than the others, but it brings me a little joy :)

            • on a serious note though, thank you for sharing your two examples - I didn’t know they existed.
      • Raptorox@sh.itjust.works
        10·
        3 days ago

        That will just wait for command to finish properly and then run yes.

        What you want to run is yes | command, so it spams the command with confirmations.

      • MonkderVierte
        5·
        3 days ago

        true delivers error level 0, false error level 1.

        yes && echo True || echo False will always be True.

        false && echo True || echo False will always be False.

        Common usage is for tools that ask for permissions and similiar. yes | cp -i has the same effect as cp --force (-i: prompt before overwrites).

      • DigitalDilemmaEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Sorry, I should have explained that. it’s command | yes yes|command - Eg, yes|apt-get update (Not a great example since apt-get has -y, but sometimes that fails when prompting for new keys to accept)

        Edit: I got it backwards, thanks @lengau@midwest.social for the correction.

        • lengau@midwest.social
          9·
          3 days ago

          You’ve got it backwards - you need to pipe the output of yes into the input of the command:

          yes | command-that-asks-a-lot-of-questions
      • markstos@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        For some cases I use “|| true”.

        The idiom accepts that the preceding command might fail, and that’s OK.

        For example, a script where mkdir creates a directory that might already exist.