Linux @programming.dev Sunshine (she/her) @lemmy.ca 3mo ago

Replace Your Regular Linux Commands With These Better Alternatives

www.maketecheasier.com Replace Your Regular Linux Commands With These Better Alternatives - Make Tech Easier

Let's look at modern, faster, and improved alternatives for frequently used Linux commands that often go unnoticed.

38 comments

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.
I love zoxide. Makes traversing the filesystem so much faster!
- 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
  
  But zoxide updates automatically, where you have to update CDPATH manually.
- 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.
- Me too! Only learned about it a while ago too. I hate logging into machines that don't have it.
I had a feeling this would be controversial 😅
- 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
  
  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)
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.
- 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.
Bat looks the most useful for me
- You can also let bat render your man pages, with some nicer coloration (and theming) than man does by default.
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'
- 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.
  
  I didn't install anything special, just used apt (on ubuntu), like sudo apt install eza. Looks like I'm using the font DejaVuSansMono.
  
  What terminal/emulator are you using?
  
  you have to install a nerd font i guess. nerd-fonts dot com.
Obilgatory cat -v considered harmful: Program Design in the UNIX Environment - Rob Pike & Brian Kernighan (PDF)
- Can you explain why a little shorter? Ain't trying to read that whole thing rn, though the snippets I read were interesting
  
  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.
I know what I'm doing tomorrow!
- Ferb nods in approval!
Start today! Replace "ls" with "dir /w"!
No
reboot to rm -rf ~/
Can someone give me a summary? That website keeps crashing my browser..
- ls to eza
  cat to bat
  cp/scp to rsync
  find to fd
  cd to zoxide
Are some of the commands replaced by Manjaro or similar? For me, it's normal to call ls and see colors...
- 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
  
  Eza is a lot more than just ls with colours though.
One thing I will agree with is to stop using SCP.

https://www.brightblack.net/blog/2024-02-09-scp-was-deprecated/

It was deprecated a while back and older, but more experienced Unix wizards still suggest it. SFTP is an alternative, but rsync also works.
Nice list of commands! I'll definitely check out eza.
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.

38 comments