Good: For interactive shell scripting: - AWK. Old enough to be part of the POSIX standard and yet considerably more awesome than almost any other UNIX command

Good: For interactive shell scripting: - AWK. Old enough to be part of the POSIX standard and yet considerably more awesome than almost any other UNIX command. - socat for any kind of network/socket testing stuff. - sponge and entr just for their genuine usefulness with minimal interface. For interactive use: - SSH. I mean, obviously. It's also astounding how well OpenSSH integrates into the whole *NIX TTY landscape. You can use it for years and still learn neat things about it. - Vim. Yes, it's obscure to learn, but once you do, boy do you get a lot out of it. Also: Since `:terminal`, working on one-off scripts has become considerably more awesome. - htop and btop++ are good examples of TUIs for interactive use. - tig is also quite cool for many git interactions (especially partial staging). - lnav for log analysis tasks. For batch jobs you set up and trigger as needed: - Beets (see: beets.io). It's impressive how streamlined it works once you've set it up. Bad: - Pretty much anything Microsoft. I really don't understand how it's possible to consistently produce bad CLI programs for such a long time. - As a prime example, have a look at `sc sdshow` and `sc sdset`. Edit: Perhaps to clarify about the sc SDDL commands: If you look them up, you won't find much "bad" in their documentation. Because nothing about the SDDL syntax they are built on is documented. The best you can do is scrape together what you can from third-party blogposts with a perceived signal:noise ratio of .000001. And SDDL in itself is phenomenally badly designed. And, of course, this being Microsoft, the tool isn't designed to be used together with other programs.