Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection | Hacker News Reader

Swiss File Knife – A Command Line Tools Collection

stahlworks.com

71 pointsinterfixus19 comments

I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log.

I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

I wonder if shells history could have an option for this. Typing 90% levenstein distance commands just a few too many time as a signal ordered by freq.

You'd get logs of what you struggle on or do very often.

If I was smarter I could probably use that. I tried it in the beginning and was just basically keeping an infinite history by catting the history from my old machines into my new.

But then I started doing stuff outside of shell (windows, code snippets, jq and path snippets, etc) and it was getting to be a pain to grep through such a big file. So I applied the 5 minute rule and tried to rely on my laziness as an editor.

Also, while my file isn’t public I don’t keep anything sensitive or that would bother any past, present, or future employers and collaborators so sanitizing the shell history was starting to take time and make me worry that I might miss something.

Oh I'm actually just learning unix/how to work properly in the Command line and building this personal source of knowledge up and am wondering if you'd be down to share/point me to places that are good resources (beyond, of course, the man pages)

also the tool discussed here is available via scoop for windows if we're trying it out

Comically my favorite reference is a paper fold out cheat sheet I got 30 years ago. I’d link you to the company but it’s in my office gathering dust for the past year. I could find it through googling and don’t want to point you to one I don’t know about.

Beyond man, I use a very inefficient system of googling “man ls” (or whatever) and using the example sites, and end up using Linux.die.net [0] the most and find it easier to use than the actual man command.

And I found ESR’s guides [1] really helpful for understanding just how stuff works.

I’m sure I would drive a proper Unix user/sysadmin fits, but I just never am root and always have a backup to restore when I break stuff. So it’s hard for me to really break something.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html

How this compares to busybox[1]? Additional functionality?

I would rather stick to posix/unix commands than learn a new list of new functions

[1]: https://www.busybox.net/

This seems to be cross-platform, while BusyBox is mostly Linux-only.

"Mostly". I recall trying a BusyBox from FreeBSD ports. Seemed sorta like a gimmick. Not really needed.

Wikipedia confirms my memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox

Busybox only gives full support for Linux, but can be and is frequently compile for a lot of operating systems, including Windows that is not a *nix per se and also embedded systems

Completely different beasts. Busybox is a tight, lightweight implementation of [a subset of] the Posix toolchain. This thing - also tight and lightweight - is a collection of commands primarily geared towards manipulation of file names and contents. Highly un-unixy (more like "do all sorts of things and do them well") but with clear, straightforward, non-arcane syntacs.

I had a pile of somewhat complex text transformations I needed to perform, and was getting headaches just contemplating the hodge-podge of cat and grep and find and awk and sed and regex and stackoverflow and kilometers of pipes I would be getting into, not being much of a wizard with such things, so went looking for something a bit less daunting. Found this, and within in an hour had a working script which I am fairly certain I will also be able to read and understand a year from now.

Got it. Even so I still prefer to learn only unix and go with it, most of the time awk solves all my data problems

About your transformation problems, give a look at NuShell[1], it's a full fledged shell but I rarely use it as a interactive shell, mostly as a scripting language, it heavily simplifies the extract, transform and load from the terminal. Also it's written in Rust and available to most mainstream OSes

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

It's very similar, except that its heritage is clearly the world of MS/PC/DR-DOS style toolsets rather than Unix toolsets. It's a multiple-function binary, with freely licensed source code, that basically provides a whole bunch of otherwise standalone tools in one.

The difference is that the standalone tools have the sorts of semantics that will be very familiar to people who lived through the times of MS/PC/DR-DOS shareware, where there were (and still are) loads of tools in this vein, both standalone and all-in-one. Both minus and plus are command-line switch characters. There's no special GNU-style marker for "long" options to differentiate them from "short" options. Command names and functions follow conventions that were more common in the MS/PC/DR-DOS shareware world (e.g. DELTREE, HEXTOBIN, HEXDUMP, COLOR, FIND). And PC-isms like the idea that there are 16 CGA colours are baked in (c.f. this toolset's ECHO command).

If you've used the Norton Utilities, the Graham Utilities, JP Software's 4DOS/4OS2/4NT, my OS/2 (and earlier DOS) Command Line Utilities, or any of the many implementations of commands such as DELTREE that were available, this sort of thing is very familiar and comfortable territory.

* https://jpsoft.com/help/tcc_and_tcclite.htm

* http://www.warpspeed.com.au/Products/OS2/GU/graham.htm

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/clu.html

* https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?dir=/&stype=all&sort=type_name&sear...

I love how the website makes me feel like I've teleported back to 2001.

I love the aesthetic, but not so much the fixed width design.

I've used the line ending tools (crlf-to-lf/addcrlf) once to fix up code written in an linux environment and stored with git to check into a SVN Windows style repo. Don't know if it was 'the' tool for the job, but worked out nicely and didn't take too long

dos2unix / unix2dos is often preinstalled and works as well

This is like another tool I've been using to do all the same kinds of thing, for decades now: awk

Malware Browser Guard plugin for Brave is blocking this website by default.

There's nothing malwareish about the source and binaries package I downloaded, nor about the version from Arch AUR I'm actually running. Your Brave may be objecting to the absense of https. Mine only states the obvious "Not secure" in the address bar.

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