A short list of the most useful Unix CLI tools

A list of handy tools (mostly CLI) developed from a discussion on #scannedinavian on Libera.chat (formerly Freenode).

• most, less, bat: text viewing
• vi: text editing
• cat, cut, join, comm, sort, merge, uniq, grep, shuf, random: basic text query
• ack, rg, awk, ack-grep: advanced text query (sometimes filesystem too)
• mpv, mplayer, evince, mupdf, xpdf, firefox, links, lynx, ebook-viewer: non-text viewing
• find, xargs: filesystem query
• fzf, fd: advanced filesystem query
• jq, JSON query
• history: bunk
• sudo: sandwiches
• ls, cd, mkdir, rmdir, mv, ln, rm, cp, du: basic file manager
• dust: alternative to du
• exa: alternative to ls
• xdu, k4dirstat: disk usage explorers
• ls, lsof, ps, w, who, ip, ifconfig, netstat, df, vmstat, dstat, top, htop: system status information
• thunar, bashmount, mkfs.vfat: mounting and formatting removable media
• sudo, apt, apt-get, apt-cache, ifconfig, dpkg, apt-file, mtr: package management and system administration
• ssh, nc, rsync, youtube-dl, gomuks, mtr, httpdito: networking
• rsync, diff, patch, cmp: file comparison and synchronization
• git, fossil, rcs: source code version tracking
• rsync, git, tar: backups
• %, bg/%&, jobs, kill, killall, pidof: multitasking
• time, tally, ulimit, ps, top, docker, lsof, pv: resource monitoring and administration
• man, info, pydoc: online help
• [, [[, while, if, read, sleep, $((..)), echo: shell scripting
• caesar: toy encryption
• units, bc, dev3/calc.py: calculation
• bc, python2, python3, awk: programming languages
• TZ=America/New_York date: world clock
• printf '\e[3gf(\eHx,\n\ty)\n': escape sequences
• watch -d: GUIfication
• reset: recovering a horked terminal
• sloccount, cloc: counting lines of source
• asciinema, screen, tmux: terminal recording, disconnecting, multiplexing
• visidata: data explorer
• darkdraw: ASCII art draw program
• dd: sorry, I can’t, tonight I’m driving
• https://github.com/eradman/entr: run arbitrary commands when files change, turning your filesystem into an event bus (originally just a test runner)
• w, who, write, wall, talk: a chat system
• xclip, xmessage: sort of GUI integration

Thanks to Shae Erisson and for the discussion this arose from!