Linux

CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear

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

Nothing new, just forgotten.

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 love ncdu for seeing where all my storage is being taken up.

losetup

it's useful for dealing with virtual disk images. like a real physical hard disk, but it's a file on the computer. you can mount it, format it, and write it to a real physical disk.

it's sometimes used with virtual machines, with iso images, or when preparing a bootable disk.

I'm not sure how underrated it is but the exec feature in find is so useful, there are so many bulk tasks that would just be incredibly difficult otherwise but instead are just one line

Underrated

Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub

Pick one

I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

motion

After spending years dealing with shady freeware and junk software on windows, I was floored by how easy and nonchalantly I was able to set up a simple security camera on my PC

Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick

all of them

ip eg:

# ip a
# ip a a 192.168.1.99/24 dev enp160

The first incantation - ip address (you can abbreviate whilst it is unambiguous) gets you a quick report of interfaces, MAC, IPs and so on. The second command assigns another IP address to an interface. Handy for setting up devices which don't do DHCP out of the box or already have an IP and need a good talking to.

Oh and you can completely set up your IP stack, interfaces and routing etc with it. Throw in nft or iptables (old school these days - sigh!) for filtering and other network packet mangling shenanigans.

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.

A really simple one but surprisingly useful is cal

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

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.