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.

  • 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.