Replace Your Regular Linux Commands With These Better Alternatives - Make Tech Easier
www.maketecheasier.com
Let's look at modern, faster, and improved alternatives for frequently used Linux commands that often go unnoticed.
  • zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Yeah, all good and nice, but as long as they are not part of all linux distributions, I will not use them. I need a ls because I know it is working on all machines that I use. Additionally, don’t forget that introducing new tools also introduces new attack surfaces, something you want to avoid on very important servers.

  • Nath@aussie.zone
    223·
    4 days ago

    The problem is the standard apps are just that - standard. I can hop onto any Redhat, Debian or Solaris 10 box at work and use ls, cat etc.

    If I went all-in on some bespoke alternatives on my special snowflake machine, I’d constantly be going nuts entering incorrect commands on remote machines and losing efficiency. Then, I’d go back to just using the standard commands everywhere.

    • silasmariner@programming.dev
      2·
      3 days ago

      They’re not though are they. Remember the pain of the last time you tried to write a portable sed then just gave up and used a `perl -pe’? That’s real. We’ve all been there.

  • silasmariner@programming.dev
    35·
    5 days ago

    Why is fzf, the best utility, relegated to the end? And why is ripgrep - a huge improvement over grep, especially if you want to search only on committed files in a git directory - not even mentioned? This list is outrageous. Even more so because I can’t pretend to have known about all of these before, and annoyingly now have to face the fact that some of these actually look pretty handy.

    • vvv@programming.dev
      16·
      5 days ago

      most shells have a CDPATH which works just like PATH but for directories. set it to $HOME/projects/:$HOME/porn/ or whatever, and you’ll get the subdirectories in your cd tab completion, without installing extra stuff

    • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      5·
      5 days ago

      I’ve just replaced cd with it. It’s so fucking convenient writing cd n and immediately entering my config, then writing cd f and entering some other project of mine.

    • Albbi@lemmy.ca
      41·
      5 days ago

      Me too! Only learned about it a while ago too. I hate logging into machines that don’t have it.

    • andioop@programming.devEnglish
      19·
      5 days ago

      Am local village idiot curious as to why this would be controversial.

      First guess: advising change from familiar workflow

      Second guess: gotta download a lot of these

      • MadhuGururajan@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        3rd thing: these tools may not be available on the remote server at your company. so you don’t want to stumble on the commands (aliases exist but the outputs are wildly different)

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
    8·
    4 days ago

    I fkn knew eza would be at the top of this list.

    E: I can’t talk, though. Here are my aliases:

    alias    ls='eza --time-style="+%Y-%m-%d" --group-directories-first --hyperlink --colour=never -hlF always --icons --git'
alias    ll='eza --time-style="long-iso" --group-directories-first --no-permissions --hyperlink --colour=never -hoalF always --icons --git'
alias     l='eza --time-style=relative --group-directories-first --hyperlink --colour=auto -hlF=always --icons --no-permissions --no-user'
    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nzEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’m running Linux Mint, I installed eza, which is nice but the icons are not showing up correctly.

      Do you know how to get them to show correctly, I installed ‘nerd fonts’ but I’m not sure I got the correct one.

      Don’t worry. It works fine in the regular terminal, it is just quake that is giving me issues.

    • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      4 days ago

      I have used it a couple times but I was unsure if using it to simply replace cp or mv commands was “proper”

    • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
      62·
      4 days ago

      Can you explain why a little shorter? Ain’t trying to read that whole thing rn, though the snippets I read were interesting

      • Gamma@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Relevant except below, bolded is the key point.

        -v prints non-printing characters in a visible representation. Making strange characters visible is a genuinely new function, for which no existing program is suitable. (sed -n l, the closest standard possibility, aborts when given very long input lines, which are more likely to occur in files containing non-printing characters.) So isn’t it appropriate to add the -v option to cat to make strange characters visible when a file is printed?

        The answer is “No.” Such a modification confuses what cat’s job is  concatenating files  with what it happens to do in a common special case  showing a file on the terminal. A UNIX program should do one thing well, and leave unrelated tasks to other programs. cat’s job is to collect the data in files. Programs that collect data shouldn’t change the data; cat therefore shouldn’t transform its input.

    • Overspark@feddit.nl
      3·
      4 days ago

      You can also let bat render your man pages, with some nicer coloration (and theming) than man does by default.

  • jnerk@lemm.ee
    4·
    4 days ago

    Can someone give me a summary? That website keeps crashing my browser…

    • emzili@programming.devEnglish
      151·
      5 days ago

      The default output of ls is uncolored, but some distros include an alias in your .bashrc for ‘ls’ to ‘ls --color=auto’, so you definitely don’t need a whole other utility just for colored output

        • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
          4·
          5 days ago

          Wow, pretty cool the tree and total size options, kind of substitutes other commands I commonly use.

          Only thing is though I find it slower than du and tree.

          • Overspark@feddit.nl
            2·
            4 days ago

            You can also try something like broot. Lovely TUI file manager that shows how big folders are when you start it with the -w option, faster than either du or tree in my experience.

        • emzili@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          That’s true, I was mostly speaking to that specific use-case. It certainly sounds like it has generally superior functionality to ls, but for me personally it doesn’t beat out the utility of already being present on every linux system I’ll touch.

          That’s unlike something like rsync which is genuinely more useful than scp for anything other than simple file transfers.

          • Overspark@feddit.nl
            3·
            5 days ago

            Yeah that’s fair, I only use it on systems where I’m in full control and use enough to get all my toys set up properly, which goes for all the commands in the article. I’ve just aliased ls to eza though, so it’ll mostly (options are a bit different) keep working on any system I’m on.