Ask HN: What's the best obscure but useful CLI tool?
4 comments
20+ years of linux, didn't know about it. Will be daily-driving it now, thanks for chiming in.
That is incredible, I had no idea this existed -- thanks for sharing!
That's awesome. Seems like it would pair well with Make.
I use inotifywait with make for a similar effect. I save a source file and my code is re-compiled and tests are run.
I love it!
I love it!
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absolutely. 100% of my projects use Entr ("run thing on file change"), and Make ("use short name to run a complex script, e.g. test -> pytest").
GNU Parallel is pretty useful. You can use it to run command line programs in parallel. For example, if you wanted to gzip compress all individual files in a directory and limit the number of jobs equal to the number of CPU cores on your machine:
ls | parallel --dry-run --jobs `nproc` 'gzip {}'
(Note you have to remove the --dry-run switch to actually run this, --dry-run only prints out the commands parallel will run, not actually execute them)
ls | parallel --dry-run --jobs `nproc` 'gzip {}'
(Note you have to remove the --dry-run switch to actually run this, --dry-run only prints out the commands parallel will run, not actually execute them)
yes: literally just type y, or whatever string, over and over again.
yes | annoying_interactive_install_script.shjdupes I find myself using it rather frequently. It is fantastic to find duplicate files.
I use this on literally 100% of my projects. Normally it's "when my source changes, run tests" or sometimes "when files change, do 'terraform plan' to see what would change".
Using this one command shortens developer feedback loops from a minute to microseconds! And you don't have to think about it! It's magic.
`ls -1 *.py | entr pytest`
`git ls-files | entr terraform plan`
For more, see our friend and national treasure Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/06/28/entr/