3 ms·

I always feel compelled to mention joeyh's moreutils whenever a discussion of coreutils comes up. If there was a sequel to coreutils it would be moreutils.

by dfc 14y ago

I always feel compelled to mention joeyh's moreutils whenever a discussion of coreutils comes up. If there was a sequel to coreutils it would be moreutils. chronic: runs a command quietly unless it fails combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8 lckdo: execute a program with a lock held mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first parallel: run multiple jobs at once pee: tee standard input to pipes sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file ts: timestamp standard input vidir: edit a directory in your text editor vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

derekp7 14y ago
Since several of these utilities you mentioned have to do with piping, I thought I'd mention a bash trick that a lot of people haven't heard of. You can take (almost) any command that takes a file name to read input from, and substitute that file name with: <(command_name) This will run the named command, send its output to a fifo (named pipe), and substitute that fifo's file name in its place. This is useful if you have to feed output from more than one command into a program -- for example, "join" takes two files, only one of them can be standard input. But if you want, you can do something like this: join -j1 1 -j2 1 <(cat somefile |sort) <(cat otherfile |sort) Or, if you want to see syntax highlighted diff output: vim <(diff -uN file1 file2) And it is also nestable: vim <(diff -uN <(command_1) <(command_2))

by dfc 14y ago

derekp7 14y ago

Since several of these utilities you mentioned have to do with piping, I thought I'd mention a bash trick that a lot of people haven't heard of. You can take (almost) any command that takes a file name to read input from, and substitute that file name with: <(command_name) This will run the named command, send its output to a fifo (named pipe), and substitute that fifo's file name in its place. This is useful if you have to feed output from more than one command into a program -- for example, "join" takes two files, only one of them can be standard input. But if you want, you can do something like this: join -j1 1 -j2 1 <(cat somefile |sort) <(cat otherfile |sort) Or, if you want to see syntax highlighted diff output: vim <(diff -uN file1 file2) And it is also nestable: vim <(diff -uN <(command_1) <(command_2))