HACKER Q&A
📣 nice-guy-coding

Favorite Command Line Tools?


Hey,

I've recently switched to Linux and after being amazed by power of command line tools like grep and awk I want to know more!

I already found ripgrep [1] and fzf [2] but there must be a lot other awesome tools like these.

[1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[2] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf


  👤 yesenadam Accepted Answer ✓
I got a lot of great answers to my similar question a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18898523

I also love awk, I use it most days for something, soo many different uses. And The AWK Programming Language is such an admirable book.

Others I use often: sips is great for image resizing, conversion. flex & bison for writing DSLs. curl and ffmpeg for image/video downloading, conversion, processing. And my own tools, it's very easy to write super-useful scripts for yourself.

uh.. like I wrote dlm to download mp4 video with curl, which I use every day (another script, dl, downloads any kind of file). Copy the video URL to the clipboard, then "dlm fname" downloads video as fname.mp4, and doesn't give up trying until complete (occasionally resume won't be supported, but doesn't happen often) :

  #! your bash shebang here....
  #dlm - download mp4
  #with resume after 10 secs until finish.
  #y and Y mean: if download goes slower than 30 bytes per
  # second for 30 secs (average), quit and resume download..
  #so can't get stuck on 0 bps indefinitely.
  fname=$(pbpaste)
  echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : "
  until curl -C - -y 30 -Y 30 -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname"
  do
    sleep 10
  done