8 ms·

Seeing tools like this pop up periodically and get so many upvotes it seems a lot of people aren't aware of great tools. It would be interesting to see a galler

Seeing tools like this pop up periodically and get so many upvotes it seems a lot of people aren't aware of great tools. It would be interesting to see a gallery of Unix classic/modern tools presented in a structured course. Is anyone aware of one? Something like images (imagemagick), video (ffmpeg/vlc), audio (sox), phone (asterisk/etc.), SMS (pdus/various), linguistics (various), classification (NNs), version control, snapshots, clustering (PXE/corosync/pacemaker), security (kernel toolkits), transaction systems and databases (sqlite/RDBMS/noSQL/time series), networking (filtering/firewall rules, intermittent connectivity, local multidrop protocols, tcpdump/wireshark), kernel security toolkits, CI/CD, etc. Scope would be essentially everything except tools lying within the popular web stacks. The goal would be that a student with interest could work their way through the syllabus and emerge a capable multi-domain unix hacker, rather than needing to encounter these problem domains over decades of career, rediscovering well worn approaches.

paradroid 9y ago
It would need to be automatically collated by an AI with access to the Internet Archive that is probably quite a bit more sophisticated than what we currently have. DMOZ is the closest curated thing I can think of.
- jypepin 9y ago
  DMOZ seems to have some good resources, going through it quickly I found http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html which has a very good bash intro!
- paradroid 9y ago
  Not sure why I was downvoted. It's not as if the person downvoting me provided a better option than I did!
jypepin 9y ago
YES THIS PLEASE. I learned programming through the web, so I lack a lot of knowledge in basic systems / bash / *nix / I'm not even sure how to call that. I've googled so many time "learn bash" etc but it's never really what I'm looking for. I regularly discover tools that are so basic yet so powerful (all things you mention) yet I feel there is a lack of (great) resources online to "learn the basic tools of your CL".
- crowbahr 9y ago
  You mean you don't just go read the man page for every bash command and intuitively understand it? Sorry for the sarcasm, I just feel your pain. Learning even basic things in bash has been slow for me too. I love it. I prefer it to GUIs on most things I have figured out. But there's so much to learn.
  - jypepin 9y ago
    from a sibling comment: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ seems to be great :)
    - moviuro 9y ago
      It isn't as good as: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide (which is the one that gets recommended on #bash @ freenode). Also: https://shellcheck.net https://shellcheck.net
  - zwischenzug 9y ago
    I spoke about bash and this exact thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3k0sGKrjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3k0sGKrjQ Plug for book that resulted: https://leanpub.com/learnbashthehardway https://leanpub.com/learnbashthehardway
  - acqq 9y ago
    Or learning git from its man pages. https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March/048184.html https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March...
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    UNIX Power Tools, written in 1992, once filled much of this niche. It badly needs updating and augmenting, or a novel replacement.
- qiqitori 9y ago
  Well, the way this person uses ImageMagick can hardly be described as "basic". In fact, he's a wizard. If you look through the bullet points at the top, he links to an impressive CV and PDFs with mathematical descriptions of how some of his scripts work.
tenken 9y ago
Such galleries in my opinion already exist and simply require an afternoon hitting github for "* awesome (list)" with every topic you've listed. Then devoting enough self-teaching time to learn the material. These lists tend to be curated by domain experts and are already in a structured format suitable to the domain. Here's 1 such example from the 1st result from a Google search for "github awesome security list": https://github.com/sbilly/awesome-security https://github.com/sbilly/awesome-security
- contingencies 9y ago
  Hmm just tried it for audio and nothing I found in three audio-related lists off the curated awesome list of awesome lists even mentioned sox. I do think you suggest a good search strategy in very new areas, but I don't think it's quite the same thing as presented in the grandparent. Personally I discovered a lot of great tools in my distribution's package management database.
  - newman8r 9y ago
    You're right, not enough people know about sox. I can spend hours making random sounds with the synth just for fun. I've been contemplating making something like dwitter.net for sox as a side project. People would submit sox commands for various interesting sounds.
jrochkind1 9y ago
have you tried vips as an alternative to imagemagick? it's pretty amazing.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Never tried it, but it looks interesting where performance and memory use are issues. https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips Also it seems to have a GUI https://github.com/jcupitt/nip2 https://github.com/jcupitt/nip2 Thanks for sharing.
Faaak 9y ago
If you work in something related to physics (energy, maths, chemistry), I can not recommend `units` enough. As a small example: You have: 10 kcal / g * 24 kg * .13USD/kWh You want: USD * 36.261333 It's so useful when converting between different units
- Something1234 9y ago
  I want a tool that does that kind of conversion for me. I've been looking(not actively or with any sort of effort) for such a too since my friend showed me a mac only text based converter that did something like the above. I've been toying with writing one.
  - michelb 9y ago
    maybe this list has an option for you? https://alternativeto.net/software/soulver/?license=free&platform=linux https://alternativeto.net/software/soulver/?license=free&pla... NaSC looks nice.
davidcuddeback 9y ago
> It would be interesting to see a gallery of Unix classic/modern tools presented in a structured course. Is anyone aware of one? Back when I used Gentoo, I discovered a lot of interesting software by simply browsing their portage repository and installing packages that sounded interesting. It's organized into sections like you describe. There were (probably still are) web sites to browse the package database too. FreeBSD's ports are organized in a similar manner.
spapas82 9y ago
A good book for learning the Unix basics is "The unix programming environment" by Kernighan & Pike. This is an old book but the concepts it teaches are invaluable even today. We used it in our university around 20 years ago but I still recommend it to unix neophytes!

paradroid 9y ago

It would need to be automatically collated by an AI with access to the Internet Archive that is probably quite a bit more sophisticated than what we currently have. DMOZ is the closest curated thing I can think of.

jypepin 9y ago
DMOZ seems to have some good resources, going through it quickly I found http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html which has a very good bash intro!
paradroid 9y ago
Not sure why I was downvoted. It's not as if the person downvoting me provided a better option than I did!

jypepin 9y ago

YES THIS PLEASE. I learned programming through the web, so I lack a lot of knowledge in basic systems / bash / *nix / I'm not even sure how to call that. I've googled so many time "learn bash" etc but it's never really what I'm looking for. I regularly discover tools that are so basic yet so powerful (all things you mention) yet I feel there is a lack of (great) resources online to "learn the basic tools of your CL".

crowbahr 9y ago
You mean you don't just go read the man page for every bash command and intuitively understand it? Sorry for the sarcasm, I just feel your pain. Learning even basic things in bash has been slow for me too. I love it. I prefer it to GUIs on most things I have figured out. But there's so much to learn.
- jypepin 9y ago
  from a sibling comment: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ seems to be great :)
  - moviuro 9y ago
    It isn't as good as: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide (which is the one that gets recommended on #bash @ freenode). Also: https://shellcheck.net https://shellcheck.net
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  I spoke about bash and this exact thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3k0sGKrjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3k0sGKrjQ Plug for book that resulted: https://leanpub.com/learnbashthehardway https://leanpub.com/learnbashthehardway
- acqq 9y ago
  Or learning git from its man pages. https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March/048184.html https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March...
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  UNIX Power Tools, written in 1992, once filled much of this niche. It badly needs updating and augmenting, or a novel replacement.
qiqitori 9y ago
Well, the way this person uses ImageMagick can hardly be described as "basic". In fact, he's a wizard. If you look through the bullet points at the top, he links to an impressive CV and PDFs with mathematical descriptions of how some of his scripts work.

tenken 9y ago

Such galleries in my opinion already exist and simply require an afternoon hitting github for "* awesome (list)" with every topic you've listed. Then devoting enough self-teaching time to learn the material. These lists tend to be curated by domain experts and are already in a structured format suitable to the domain. Here's 1 such example from the 1st result from a Google search for "github awesome security list": https://github.com/sbilly/awesome-security https://github.com/sbilly/awesome-security

contingencies 9y ago
Hmm just tried it for audio and nothing I found in three audio-related lists off the curated awesome list of awesome lists even mentioned sox. I do think you suggest a good search strategy in very new areas, but I don't think it's quite the same thing as presented in the grandparent. Personally I discovered a lot of great tools in my distribution's package management database.
- newman8r 9y ago
  You're right, not enough people know about sox. I can spend hours making random sounds with the synth just for fun. I've been contemplating making something like dwitter.net for sox as a side project. People would submit sox commands for various interesting sounds.

jrochkind1 9y ago

have you tried vips as an alternative to imagemagick? it's pretty amazing.

contingencies 9y ago
Never tried it, but it looks interesting where performance and memory use are issues. https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips Also it seems to have a GUI https://github.com/jcupitt/nip2 https://github.com/jcupitt/nip2 Thanks for sharing.

Faaak 9y ago

If you work in something related to physics (energy, maths, chemistry), I can not recommend `units` enough. As a small example: You have: 10 kcal / g * 24 kg * .13USD/kWh You want: USD * 36.261333 It's so useful when converting between different units

Something1234 9y ago
I want a tool that does that kind of conversion for me. I've been looking(not actively or with any sort of effort) for such a too since my friend showed me a mac only text based converter that did something like the above. I've been toying with writing one.
- michelb 9y ago
  maybe this list has an option for you? https://alternativeto.net/software/soulver/?license=free&platform=linux https://alternativeto.net/software/soulver/?license=free&pla... NaSC looks nice.

davidcuddeback 9y ago

> It would be interesting to see a gallery of Unix classic/modern tools presented in a structured course. Is anyone aware of one? Back when I used Gentoo, I discovered a lot of interesting software by simply browsing their portage repository and installing packages that sounded interesting. It's organized into sections like you describe. There were (probably still are) web sites to browse the package database too. FreeBSD's ports are organized in a similar manner.

spapas82 9y ago

A good book for learning the Unix basics is "The unix programming environment" by Kernighan & Pike. This is an old book but the concepts it teaches are invaluable even today. We used it in our university around 20 years ago but I still recommend it to unix neophytes!