Cool *nix tools

[alpha]

How about everyone posting their favourite chosen few nifty *nix tools? Not the essentials like an X window manager, I'm talking about those juicy extras :) I'm just interested in what everybody uses.

[Darkness Productions]

perl. 'nuff said

[alpha]

Of course, perl :) I didn't even bother mentioning it because it is part of the FreeBSD base system, and I forgot it may not be for other *nixes.

Edit: Forgot to mention Dillo (http://www.dillo.org/) - a blindingly fast web browser. Unfortunately it seems to crash quite a bit for me. Anyone else experience similar?

[Bok]

Perl for almost everything... and it's modules Perl::LWP, PERL::DBI etc ;)

editing

vim

commandline scripting

awk
sed

For checking my network

nmap

and of course for the Gentoo users out there -

emerge

:notworthy

Bok :D

[guru]

For WiFi I like,
airfart
airsnort
kismet
ap-util

Firewall,
smoothwall 2.0 Yea, it's not a tool but I use it like one. :)

VNC Not just for unix.
motion Video capture/monitoring with motion detection.
wget Great for grabbing files from the internet via a terminal
mtx usefull for tape auto changers


kill -9 for everthing that gets in my way! :swear:

guru

[magnav0x]

I'd like the second the vote for kill -9 . It's my favorite :D

[Bok]

it certainly works well for my chessbrain clients :)

kill -9 `ps -ef|grep cbspn|awk '{print $2}'`

Bok :D

[Paratima]

Y'all already got all the good ones... :p

perl

vim

snort

VNC ~I LOVE VNC!

And I use top a lot at work, trying to figure out what has gang agley.

Heh, of course, I also use nethack a lot at work, but not running under that name or where the boss can watch over my shoulder.

[alpha]

Oh yes, definitely nethack. I've spent many a dull afternoon playing that game :)

Also, where would we be without screen? I never don't use it! I also use squid for web caching, and pdnsd for DNS caching. Love them both.

UAE, the Amiga emulator is excellent, for when you're done playing nethack. :D

[Scoofy12]

enable....

er no, sorry wrong CLI :)

was gonna say screen and vnc but someone got those.

and not even emerge was enough to pull me away from apt-get :) (and if you like apt-get, theres aptitude)

anyone else here a jed user? (or failing that, emacs :) )

and i prefer killall to kill because i'm too lazy to look up PIDs (although i do tend to use top and ps aux a fair amount)

also, i use scp a lot, on unix and windows both (Winscp does scp/sftp)

[Darkness Productions]

Originally posted by Scoofy12
and i prefer killall to kill because i'm too lazy to look up PIDs (although i do tend to use top and ps aux a fair amount)


killall would be great if it did the same thing in all places. On debian for the Alpha, it kills *all* processes. It does the same thing on Solaris, and in many other places...

[QIbHom]

apt-get rocks. I'm even considering building it on my LFS system, although that is probably too masochistic for even me.

bash. Tab completion is just the thing to deal with those wretched 129 character file names. Especially if, like me, you are dyslexic.

man. It's frequently cryptic, and comprehensible only if you don't need it, but I'd rather chew off my arm than run a system without manpages.

Ok, so I'm talking about basic tools that are already there. But, the basic cli tools are the efficient tools that will save you hours of time, once you spend hours of time to learn them. Why fire up vim, emacs, joe, OO or whatever to write a 3 line script when you can just cat the stuff into the file nearly instantly?

As for fancy add-ons, I've been known to use webmin, and I'm addicted to the gnome character map palate thingie that lives in that upper toolbar.

nethack isn't a fancy add on, it is a necessity. As is frozen bubble, on any system that has X running.

[Dyyryath]

I like an awful lot of Unix tools. Here's a small smattering of my favorite:

Shell/CLI: bash, vim, grep, awk, less, time, tar, man, screen, top
Networking: ethereal, ntop, tcpdump, nmap, etherape, snort, nessus, bittorrent
Mail: evolution, postfix
Browser: galeon, firefox
Graphics: gimp, sodipodi
Desktop: gdesklets, gkrellm2
Music: xmms, grip
Video: gxine, totem, mplayer
CD/DVD: k3b
Packaging: emerge/portage (Gentoo), urpmi (Mandrake), distcc
Scripting: perl, bash, python, php (on the web)