Somewhat Unknown Linux Commands You Should Know About

Prompt

In the Unix world in general, with the exception of macOS, the most normal thing is that it depends a lot, a lot on the terminal, leaving the desktop environment in the background on many occasions. As you know, there are many commands we use frequently. But their number is so high that it is difficult to know all of them and some of them we do not usually use too much and others we have not even heard of them.

In this article we will try to present some lesser known or exotic commands that not all users use or do it very occasionally. Some time ago I made an article on this same blog to deal with this same topic, and it is worth remembering it a bit, since both posts can complement each other. In addition, we also made a great list on rare distros, which always tends to generate quite a bit of curiosity among our readers. You can see them here...

We start with this new selection of rare tools, or rather, less everyday:

  • termsave: it is a command or tool that can create screensavers or screen savers for our terminal like the ones we use for our graphic environments. The theme of these text-based screensavers is diverse, such as Star Wars, clocks, or Matrix,… If you have the tool installed on your distro, you can use the -h option to get help with its operation and options.
  • pv: ps will sound to all of us, another command we use frequently, but this other one will not sound to all of us. In this case you can supervise data copy monitoring and other uses. Among its options are those of controlling the speed or performance of the process, byte counter in transfers, completion time, timer for the process, progress bar, etc.
  • calendar: It is not as strange as the previous ones, but surely with the calendar utilities that desktop environments have, few will make use of it. This is a modification of the BSD systems calendar for Linux, but without the phases of the moon and sun. It can be very practical to generate plain text files with our own calendars.

Do you dare to make use of any of them?


8 comments, leave yours

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

*

*

  1. Responsible for the data: AB Internet Networks 2008 SL
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
  3. Legitimation: Your consent
  4. Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation.
  5. Data storage: Database hosted by Occentus Networks (EU)
  6. Rights: At any time you can limit, recover and delete your information.

  1.   Jimmy olano said

    Hum, the ** calendar ** command looks interesting, where does it get data from and how can we use it to our advantage? We will study it and publish an entry on our blog.

  2.   Walter Omar Dari said

    Hello people:

    I have been using ncal for a long time to generate our calendars. The output is then copied into inkscape, which is what we use to make the almanac designs.

    The syntax I use is ...

    ncal -M -C 2017 (or whatever year you need)

    … Is for the weeks to start on Monday.

    Greetings.

    1.    Jimmy olano said

      Thanks for the information, that is another command that is included in Ubuntu because neither "calendar" and "ncal" knew them. To study then, we fans of the command terminal.

  3.   mlpbcn said

    I do not agree that it is so dependent on the terminal, at least today. At least I use Manjaro and I hardly use the terminal. I use it because I like it, since I have been a computer user since I used a computer for the first time, an Amstrad Cpc 464, in which everything was in text mode. That is why I am used to using it. I have installed Manjaro to several friends who hardly know about computers and are delighted and do not use the terminal at all. If we want people who only use Windows to start using Linux, let's stop saying that the terminal is used a lot, which is also not true, since maybe we would get many to leave Windows and go to Linux.

    1.    Walter Omar Dari said

      I think you are wrong in that it depends so much on the terminal, actually more than a dependency, for many, it is a convenience and a more direct way of performing certain tasks. A new user can safely do without the console. But when you are a few years old, and especially on servers, the console is very practical for many maintenance and control tasks, automation, etc.
      In my company we have installed several client computers with Debian and none of them know what the terminal is about, and they live with that without problems.

      Greetings.

  4.   Alfonso Davila said

    It would be very interesting if this becomes a series of several articles on little known commands, noob's like me, we would really appreciate it.

  5.   Jimmy olano said

    We already have our expanded article on little-known commands in GNU / Linux, the first was the "calendar" command, which we gave useful use both as a tool itself and as a programming technique in C language, and we even made a repository on GitHub!

    Here is our grain of sand to the dissemination of knowledge, free software for a more just society:

    http://www.ks7000.net.ve/2017/04/21/comandos-gnulinux-conocidos/

  6.   Hector Molina said

    Very much in agreement with those who affirm that the console is used only by those who want it, and yes, there are some things that are made faster and easier by terminal, but that does not mean that those who do not want it or do not know how to use it can't live happily with your favorite distro. That attacks those who would like to switch to Linux but are afraid because they get it with this type of headlines that instead of clarifying they discourage unnecessarily.