Linux, Unix, and *nix like Operating Systems Forum

Mutt the mail reader.

grep for search in log files

Nick

ncftp2 - ncftp is the coolest ftp client on the planet (version 2)

du - for checking disk space of directories

ruby is my swiss-army knife, and is combined with just about the rest of /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin. Every now and then I use something in /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin, and /usr/X11R6/bin.

mutt, procmail, spamassassin - for email

vi - editing files

perl - one-liners for munging files

Vim!
ncftp
ssh

history ¦ awk '{print $2}' ¦ sort ¦ uniq -c ¦ sort -n

and god this:

484 ls
400 cd
394 perl
288 man
233 less
186 apt-cache
170 mysql
123 locate
119 make
104 dpkg
95 rm
87 grep
71 ps
64 tail
63 jed
63 cvs
57 bc
56 sh
56 mv
45 cat
42 wget
38 host
35 eog
34 xlsatoms
34 mysqldump
34 gcc
33 cp
31 rsync
31 cvs
30 ssh
30 find

As you can see, I do most of my file management in the shell. I never quite got used to graphical file managers, even though I use nautilus regularly.

Besides file management, there's some development work (perl, cvs, man, gcc, make), some server updates (rsync, ssh) and some maintenance (apt-cache, dpkg, mysqldump)

I use it mostly for transforming text files. For example, one script processes an error log from a major database application. Once grep is done, sed processes the results, turning them into a nice simple html page with the errors in an ordered list.

Actually it's the inverse. In the old times the only way to edit a text file was with ed (not sed), until Billy Joy got sick of dealing with unbuffered lines and devised a VIsual ed :)

Oh, and...

ogg123
dselect
ssh, ssh-add, cvs
make install
locate
My countless bash scripts based on wget

<added>I stand corrected.</added>

Some more:

octave, maxima
python as a calculator
cal, calendar, date
fortune

When the first common teletypes (monochrome text-only monitors common in the 70s and early 80s) appeared, you could programmatically control a viewing area of more than one line, so ex/vi appeared. Ex was little more than a beefed up ed, and vi was the corresponding visual superstructure, the display engine, if you want. You could still run ex in commandline mode, just as ed, if you had to, but running vi on a paper terminal used up a lot of paper :-)

Sed was a variation of ed, and thus independent of ex/vi. Ed was actually rather powerful, especially wrt to search and replace functions, so when the pipe was invented back in the 70s (must have been Unix v4 or v5, because it was definitely there in v6), the ed internals was modified to work as a filter, hence sed, Stream EDitor. Given it was invented for use in pipes, in wonder why they didn't opt for ped, Pipe EDitor, but they didn't.

Grep is also a child of ed. The command in ed for finding and printing lines that match a regular expression is (literally) "g/RE/p" where RE is the Regular Expresssion. Grep is just that part separated from the ed interface. Later the extended grep (egrep) and the fixed string (fgrep) joined the family. Grep was also a part of Unix v6, so it is also from one of the very early version of Unix.

But seriously, in addition to that and others mentioned already:

reboot

^--- that deletes all the files on your hard disk.