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.
jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts
I love jq, but I wouldn’t call it “surprising simple” for anything but pretty-formatting json. It has a fairly steep learning curve for doing anything with all but the simplest operations on the simplest data structures.
It’s not even pretty or accessible. 2-spaced indentation is incredibly hard to read.
It can also format minimized JSON from cURL API requests
Combine with jc to process CSV files. This is how I get data into my plain text accounting system.
jqandyqare both things I install on pretty much every machine I have.