Cool, but obscure Unix tools

<p><pre><code> abcde - CD to mp3 ripper apg - random password generator base64 - better than uuencode boxes - draw any kind of boxes around your text bsdiff - binary differ bspatch - binary patcher bvi - binary vi (yet another hex editor) ccx2 - console xmms2 client clive - flash video downloader dvipdfmx - dvi to pdf converter enfuse - poor man's HDR get_flash_videos - yet another flash video downloader glark - advanced grep indent - code beautifier lshw - list hardware configuration mcurl - multiple part downloader using curl mktemp - safely create temporary files and directories msort - sort records in complex ways netbrake - bandwidth limiter od - octal dump par - paragraph reformatter par2 - archive verification and repair tool ped - sed done right with perl pinfo - color info reader pipe.vim - make vim part of a unix pipe and allow it to edit the pipe contents pv - Pipe Viewer: a tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipe pydf - pretty df (disk space viewer) qmv - use your favorite editor to rename files (part of renameutils) qodem - modem program that can do serial, telnet, ssh, zmodem, kermit, etc rdiff-backup - like rsync, but can do incremental backups recode - like dos2unix and unix2dos, but with many more encodings recordmydesktop - make screencast videos remark - great logfile colorizer (part of regex-markup) rkhunter - find rootkit infections rlwrap - add readline editing support to any command safecopy - data recovery tool (better than dd) sponge - soak up stdin and write to a file (for things like pipeline editing) sux - su while transferring X credentials unbuffer - force flushing of stdout upx - executable compressor utimer - countdown timer and stopwatch vared - edit shell variables (part of zsh) watch - run a command multiple times and display the output (with differences highlighted) xdotool - simulate keyboard and mouse activity xxd - hex dump zargs - a version of xargs that makes the find command redundant (part of zsh) zed - very small and fast vi-like editor (part of zsh) zrun - automatically uncompress arguments to command</code></pre>

How is vim an obscure tool? I'm pretty sure quite a few people use vim daily. After looking over this list, I suspect it's also true for many listed programs.

sl<p><pre><code> ==== ________ ___________ _D _| |_______/ \__I_I_____===__|_________| |(_)--- | H\________/ | | =|___ ___| _________________ / | | H | | | | ||_| |_|| _| \_____A | | | H |__--------------------| [___] | =| | | ________|___H__/__|_____/[][]~\_______| | -| | |/ | |-----------I_____I [][] [] D |=======|____|________________________|_ __/ =| o |=-~~\ /~~\ /~~\ /~~\ ____Y___________|__|__________________________|_ |/-=|___|| || || || |_____/~\___/ |_D__D__D_| |_D__D__D_| \_/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/</code></pre>

If rsync is obscure, then I'm a dumpster wizard. That's a wizard that lives in an overturned dumpster.

I really like pipe viewer (pv). I wish it as more common in base installs of Linux.<p><a href="http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/</a>

&#62; nethack &#38; slash'em<p>&#62; Still the most complex game on the planet.<p>Dwarf Fortress.

tsort -- perform topological sort<p>I bet very few people here are aware of its existence, even it has been part of Unix since Version 7. I recently discovered it and have used it to solve some project Euler problems.

Have a look at `join', it joins lines of two files on a common field. Together with `cut' and `grep' you can use text-files as relational databases.

I recently discovered nl and felt sad about the amount of time I had wasted figuring out how to add line numbers to files.

You don’t need stdio.h to use puts.<p>I was in the process of making something similar before I found what I wanted – rlwrap. It provides readline line editing capabilities to command line applications that don’t support them, such as netcat.

For those who want to learn how to write their own UNIX tools, and specifically, how to write tools that work well with other UNIX tools, such as the shell and friends, this article may help - Developing a Linux command-line utility: <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-clutil/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-clutil/</a>

I recently discovered 'bc'. It stands for 'basic calculator' or more precisely from the man page - 'arbitrary precision arithmetic language'. It is all but a basic calculator, with better floating point precision capabilities than Java/Python.

Hi guys,<p>Kristof here, creator of this particular list. First, thanks for the kind words! :)<p>I'll maybe add more tools when I have some time to make more screenshots. It's surprisingly more time consuming than it seems :)<p>Also, I'm a bit of two minds with the whole list -- many people think that some of these tools are already not "obscure" enough, while others suggest adding even more trivial ones like ifconfig or grep. I'll have to think about this a bit :)<p>Once again, thanks for your feedback!<p>KKovacs

htop, tmux/screen, xargs, vim/emacs, rsync, rtorrent, ack are far common to everyone I know (direct and indirectly) that uses the command line.

`ncdu` is a godsend. It's like `du` but usable for troubleshooting.<p>None of the following from this list are obscure: screen, vim, rsync, xargs, curl<p>I'm tempted to put ack in that list.

Even though these aren't really obscure, but they're worth mentioning as some of the best unix "tools" I've seen:<p><pre><code> Irssi - irc client Mutt - email client </code></pre> These are mentioned mostly because he included the newsbeuter rss client (which is amazing, I highly recommend it).

Here's a few of my favourites.<p>agrep - approximate grep based on edit distance).<p>GNU Global - source tagging system that integrates with the shell (less -tfunc displays the function given in the shell).<p>xmllint - xml validator, pretty printer and schema validator.

Here's one that I find does not get a lot of mention but is quite useful when you need it.<p>"tee"

Guake/yakuake - A top-down terminal based on the tilda terminal from the game Quake.<p>Redshift/f.lux - Redshift adjusts the color temperature of your screen according to your surroundings.

Great post! It introduced me to a few tools I wasn't aware of previously. The main OS on my laptop is Ubuntu so this is very appreciated.

My obscure favorites:<p>yafc: The best command-line FTP client that nobody's ever heard of. Local caching, tab completion, bookmarking, SFTP, and other generally awesome stuff.<p>clex: Full-screen file manager for command-line junkies. Configurable directory display, smart name completion, enhances the command line without seeking to replace it.

I've discovered a lot of new apps from the post and comments. Give ncmpcpp, an excellent ncurses mpd client, a try and say goodbye to GUI music players.<p><a href="http://unkart.ovh.org/ncmpcpp/screenshots.php" rel="nofollow">http://unkart.ovh.org/ncmpcpp/screenshots.php</a><p>Also in line with tmux, checkout teamocil and tmuxinator on github.

Libcaca and its various programs:<p><a href="http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca" rel="nofollow">http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca</a><p>Also, there is neercs, a terminal multiplexer that uses libcaca: <a href="http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/neercs" rel="nofollow">http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/neercs</a>

Most of these aren't obscure, but it was a good read, and I didn't know about slurm.<p>So over on one of the test machines I apt-get install cowsay ... One of the other devs here is going go get a surprise next time he logs into one of the webservers ... ;)

Its amusing to see nethack and cowsay listed as a full-fledged unix 'tool's.

mytop - a `top` clone for MySQL

My operating system doesn't have a package manager ;)

Apparently he hasn't discovered autojump yet :-D

lftp is cool, though I wish FTP would die (as telnet sensibly did over a decade ago) so I will no longer need it.

Is it worth mentioning pushd/popd here?

And all these are replaced by Emacs :p

cowsay is used on craiglist's 404 page.

why nmap is not listed?

Another cool one is xmlstarlet. It's like grep and sed and some on top, but for XML files.<p>Especially, xmlstarlet sel lets you select whatever data you want from XML files, being a command-line XSL templates generator.<p>Don't know anything else useful for XML, so it fills a vacuum.