Obsolete Command-Line Tools of Linux | Hacker News Reader

Obsolete Command-Line Tools of Linux

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12 pointsjaphyr20 comments

In my most charitable assumption, this is just ragebait farming engagement. Nobody would endanger their own safety saying these things in a serious tone. Not in public, anyway.

This entire article is the product of ChatGPT. Probably including that awful image at the top.

Basically it's about the "ip" command and some net tools. The rest are a sideshow. And almost all things are both available, or even installed. So.. its a rant in disguise.

"stop being old people" ok...

meanwhile, over in BSD.. these tools work fine

(I do however think tmux is a better choice than screen)

As a long time ‘screen’ user, one thing I appreciated was that you could count on it to be installed on almost any machine you ssh into. Is ‘tmux’ one of those things where it’s safe to assume it’ll always be there?

Tmux is rarely ever there by default (only on OpenBSD that I know of), but it's always available. On the other hand, screen isn't available by default on many Linux distros either.

No matter how old the machine/distro, screen is packaged. Tmux is only packaged for recent distro versions.

  optimal% which screen
  screen not found
  optimal% uname -a
  FreeBSD optimal.algebras.org 14.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p3 GENERIC amd64
  optimal%

  magicpudding% uname -a
  FreeBSD magicpudding.local 13.3-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE-p4 n257491-41f6a830f8e TRUENAS amd64
  magicpudding% which screen
  magicpudding%

packaged, not installed

Are you running a lot of systems on over-decade-old OSs? Because tmux isn't really new anymore

I like screen, but I think newer versions of rhel don’t have it

No. A major downside. But cross distro/os screen wasn't reliably available either. Which also socks.

When dealing with UNIXs like AIX, screen is the only choice.

Plus I noticed it is a bit lighter than tmux. But there was one odd instance where I had a minor issue with screen, I forgot what it was.

FWIW, tmux comes with NetBSD too, I suspect maybe it is there by default on FreeBSD too.

I also am an avid screen user. There are a number of places where I need a serial console and TMUX basically says "we will not support serial connections ever".

screen is way better than the alternatives for what I want. I never got minicom to work as smoothly as screen. It's just so clunky.

telnet is always going to be useful for connecting to a TCP port that might be open, not just deprecated port 23.

Yes, that's what I use it for.

nc (netcat) is also similar.

I have been using curl for this now.

Maybe they are more modern and with more features and so on, but the default user experience absolutely sucks on tmux and ip, which makes using them useless on servers you don't control, and asking to "oh lemme just drop my config here" is just insane as a default.

Which is why the older tools don't go away.

A lot of these utilities are still useful in limited environments. OpenWrt routers still use the network based ones, and for most of the others busybox implements them with just a few lines of code. In some cases the simplicity also aids with scripting in the limited environments as well.

Also: iptables to nftables

Don’t you dare touching my favorite tools :)

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