Indispensible Unix Tools

The Basics

• cat
• bash
• history

  ^R - reverse history search
  !command - last event starting with command
  command !$ !^ !* !!:n  - reuse previous commandline args
  

• redirecting output
• backquote
• jobs
• tail and colortail
• grep

  grep -v "excluded text"
  grep "x\|u"
  

• awk
• wc
• find
• xargs
• fortune
• cowsay
• cron
• sort
• less
• tar/ gzip
• mail
• sed
• vi
• uniq
• join
• rsync
• nohup
• top, htop, kill, ps, killall, df, rn

Visualisation

• the clipboard
• dot
• gnuplot
• watch

Remoting

• ssh
• scp
• screen
• curl/ wget

Not so indispensible, but people might disagree…

• emacs
• rl – returning random lines from a stream
• pandoc – converting documents