64
votes

Following in the spirit of Hidden Features of PowerShell and various others on Stack Overflow, what Linux commands or combinations of commands do you find essential in your work?

Also See:
Hidden Features of MySQL
Hidden Features of PowerShell
Hidden features of Oracle Database
Hidden Features of Windows 2008
Hidden Features of Solaris/OpenSolaris
Hidden Features of SQL Server
Hidden Features of IIS (6.0 / 7.0)

54 Answers 54

52
votes

To get the ball going, I find screen to be essential:

When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill the current window, view a list of the active windows, turn output logging on and off, copy text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the users terminal.

4
  • has anyone got anything to say about the screen profiles rolling out with ubuntu 9.04? i looked at them for a bit but didn't give them enough time to be able to say if they're actually useful or just look nice
    – xkcd150
    May 2, 2009 at 4:02
  • 12
    OMG! screen again? May 13, 2009 at 16:07
  • @xkcd150, they're pretty similar, but the biggest win is the status line. It shows all your windows plus a heap of stuff about the machine.
    – staticsan
    Feb 5, 2010 at 3:08
  • And if you want a good version of screen use tmux ;) Jan 17, 2012 at 15:11
45
votes

Maybe I don't use these every day, but I use them frequently:

  • strace Check out what files are loaded by the process.
  • htop A nicer top.
  • mtr ping + traceroute combined
  • lynx/links/w3m In case you need console browsing
  • ettercap Great network sniffer (i prefer it over wireshark)
  • scripting bash Every *nix admin should know this.
  • A programming language. For the more complex things, stay away from bash scripting and use something like python/perl/ruby/tcl/... (I use Lisp)
  • Midnight Commander can be great for people who liked norton commander.
  • irssi You never know when you just want to go ask something on IRC.
  • wget / curl Download stuff from the command line.
  • scp Copy stuff over ssh
  • lftp / ncftp Good (scriptable) console FTP clients.
  • iotop Check what's stressing your disks
  • nmap good port scanner
2
  • I would add atop too
    – PiL
    May 23, 2010 at 17:08
  • Both the TLDP bash documents are very bad.
    – adaptr
    Dec 1, 2011 at 14:59
33
votes

I was surprised to find that you can run remote GUI applications over SSH, using the "-X" parameter. For example:

# on my machine
$ ssh -X linuxserver
# on remote machine
$ gedit /etc/my.cnf &

The gedit window appears on my local machine, editing the "my.cnf" file on the server.

I'm assuming this only works if your client machine has an X environment -- in other words, not on Windows. But it works great on my Mac!

5
  • 9
    using xming sourceforge.net/projects/xming you can have it work on windows, too!
    – xkcd150
    May 2, 2009 at 4:04
  • 3
    SSH forwarding does encryption which slows everything down. If you're on a secure LAN you can just send programs from one Linux desktop to another Linux computers X session. Very handy. I used to run movies via mplayer like that on my main desktop which was plugged into the stero at one end of the lounge room. The mplayer audio would then go out the stereo but the image would got to my laptop (via ethernet) at the other end of the lounge room which was plugged into the data projector. Home movie awesomeness.
    – Gareth
    May 3, 2009 at 7:13
  • 5
    Instead of adding the -X each time you could update your ssh_config with a host line that matches your internal hosts and address space 'Host .domain.org 192.168..*' and enable the option 'ForwardX11 yes'
    – Zoredache
    May 4, 2009 at 7:52
  • I've grown accustomed to -Y, never learned the difference though.
    – Notmyfault
    Jun 25, 2009 at 5:52
  • -Y is trusted X11 forwarding. It's way more secure than -X (simple X11 forwarding). BTW many default sshd setups won't allow -X now, only -Y. If using -X you encounter strange errors, apps closing with "MIT MAGIC COOKIE" errors, then use -Y. Conclusion : don't use -X, only -Y
    – wazoox
    Jun 26, 2009 at 9:42
33
votes

lsof often gets ignored, its a very useful tool. lsof lets you view a list of every open file on the system, who / what is using it, etc.

For instance:

root@tower:~ # umount /mnt/hardy
umount: /mnt/hardy: device is busy
umount: /mnt/hardy: device is busy
root@tower:~ # lsof | grep /mnt/hardy
bash       5966       root  cwd       DIR      253,2     1024          2 /mnt/hardy
root@tower:~ #

Now I see that I'm logged into a shell in another terminal, and /mnt/hardy is my current working directory. So I can either kill that shell, or go to the other terminal and get out of that directory so it can be unmounted.

That's really a trivial example, its very handy for cleaning up the occasional 'bot' infestation too. The options are extensive, see man lsof for more.

3
  • 2
    fuser is another nice trick, if you're only interested in one file or one mountpoint.
    – bdonlan
    May 5, 2009 at 6:21
  • 1
    Hidden for sure. I've been looking for this feature for ages. (I'm a noob though)
    – cgp
    May 8, 2009 at 13:29
  • lsof is truly wonderful. Combined with the UNIX idea of everything (well, almost) being a file, it can do amazing things. Many things that at first seem impossible or hard to do turn out to be solvable with a oneliner thanks to some of lsof's options.
    – ptman
    May 23, 2010 at 17:21
31
votes

To change to the last directory you were in:

cd -
1
  • I use this all the time.
    – MathewC
    Jun 26, 2009 at 12:21
26
votes

Network stack can be left running after a system halt. I don't know if this is current with the 2.6.x series of kernels, but on older versions, you could configure the firewall/routing, then halt the system without a shutdown, leaving just the network stack running. This would allow you to make a cheap (although static) firewall that "can't be hacked" - because there's nothing to hack, as there are no programs or services, just the network stack portion of the kernel passing packets back and forth...

3
  • Wow. Really cool! +1 I am certainly going to try this out on a 2.6 kernel when I have some spare time.
    – wzzrd
    May 27, 2009 at 10:43
  • That's awesome, but how is it unhackable? Doesn't the kernel still have to be running? Or is it a minimal kernel?
    – cdeszaq
    May 29, 2009 at 18:42
  • 7
    "Kernel"? What is this "Kernel" you speak of? When it goes into this mode, the only code running is the /network stack/. No task scheduling, no APIs, code, services, user space, nothing, zip, nada...just the faint sound of packets echoing through ethernet... Think of it as more of an embedded device with two functions in life - accept, and send, packets. I suppose you could "hack" this in the sense that you can try and sneak packets through, but there's nothing you can /directly/ attack in the stack itself. May 29, 2009 at 19:51
24
votes

I like "locate" - a much easier way to find files than the gnarly "find . -name xxxx -print". Note that you have to use the updatedb command with it to a your file index up to date; see the man pages for details.

7
  • 4
    Luckily, many Linux distros include updatedb in cron.daily :-). May 2, 2009 at 22:26
  • 1
    It's also much, much faster than find.
    – cgp
    May 8, 2009 at 13:27
  • It should be pointed out that some people see locate as a security risk. That being said, I use it all the time :-)
    – baudtack
    May 22, 2009 at 23:26
  • Recent verions of locate have the -i switch for ignoring case, very handy.
    – niXar
    Sep 23, 2009 at 10:00
  • And as to security, there are secure locate versions, which let you "find" only those files the logged-in user can actually see. Jan 8, 2010 at 12:54
19
votes

I find "ngrep" really useful for debugging network code on remote servers without having to punt tcpdump files around:

ngrep -d any -W byline port 80

for example, will show you live HTTP requests and responses.

One other thing I've found useful frequently is the "-e" switch to strace:

strace -p <pid> -e trace=open

will show all open() syscalls for a given pid, and

strace -p <pid> -e trace=\!rt_sigprocmask

will exclude all calls to rt_sigprocmask() from the output (useful for debugging RoR code, which seems to make an awful lot of those calls when built to use pthreads).

1
  • Now I really starting to love linux. :)
    – THEn
    May 13, 2010 at 14:35
17
votes
apropos

DESCRIPTION Each manual page has a short description available within it. apropos searches the descriptions for instances of keyword.

gyaresu@debian:~/bin$ apropos ettercap
etter.conf (5)       - Ettercap configuration file
ettercap (8)         - (unknown subject)
ettercap_curses (8)  - (unknown subject)
ettercap_plugins (8) - (unknown subject)
1
  • I always useman -k instead but I'm spelling impaired.
    – mctylr
    Mar 11, 2010 at 19:18
15
votes

Thankfully I've only needed a couple of times, but the Magic SysRq key still remains one of my all time favorite hidden features.

Alt+SysRq+RSEIUB

2
  • 1
    +1 Magic SysRQ is golden. Remember 'Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring' as a hint in which order to use the keys, though the order is not set in stone. Which is why RSEIUB is used above: it syncs data to disk before giving the 'terminate' and 'kill' commands instead of the other way around. Correct order is debatable.
    – wzzrd
    May 27, 2009 at 10:48
  • Another memory aid: BUSIER (spelled backwards).
    – Mei
    May 18, 2011 at 16:53
13
votes
NAME
 units -- conversion program

DESCRIPTION
 The units program converts quantities expressed in various scales to their 
equivalents in other scales.  The units program can only handle multiplicative
scale changes.  It cannot convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, for example.
It works interactively by prompting the user for input:

     You have: meters
     You want: feet
             * 3.2808399
             / 0.3048

     You have: cm^3
     You want: gallons
             * 0.00026417205
             / 3785.4118

     You have: meters/s
     You want: furlongs/fortnight
             * 6012.8848
             / 0.00016630952

     You have: 1|2 inch
     You want: cm
             * 1.27
             / 0.78740157
12
votes

It's not really that hidden, but may be so for those with no experience, but I really like being able to give lists and let bash expand them like in:

cp arq{,.bak}

which is the same as typing

cp arq arq.bak

I also use the history shortcuts (I don't think that's the right term, but...) like

!! 

to repeat the last command, or

^foo^bar 

to replace foo by bar in the last command

12
votes

ssh-copy-id for transferring ssh keys. The old way was to cat the key over ssh and even older was to scp the key and then cat the key. If you are using a non-standard ssh port then this will do the trick for you ..

ssh-copy-id -i /path/to/key '-p nonstandardport hostname'

Other wise..

ssh-copy-id -i /path/to/key hostname

11
votes

Virtual consoles. Most people know how to use (Ctrl-)Alt-F1 to get to the first console, etc., but what if you have more than 12? You can use Alt-Left and Alt-Right to cycle through the rest of them. :-D

2
  • wow, dude, at that point, just use screen. hehe :) i have it in my .screenrc to show a taskbar at the bottom letting me know screens are open
    – Roy Rico
    Mar 11, 2010 at 23:54
  • and what id the 12'th console is running a desktop environment(e.g. gnome)?
    – Behrooz
    Apr 23, 2011 at 12:29
11
votes

I like the debian-goodies package:

Description: Small toolbox-style utilities for Debian systems
 These programs are designed to integrate with standard shell tools,
 extending them to operate on the Debian packaging system.
 .
  dgrep  - Search all files in specified packages for a regex
  dglob  - Generate a list of package names which match a pattern
 .
 These are also included, because they are useful and don't justify
 their own packages:
 .
  debget       - Fetch a .deb for a package in APT's database
  dpigs        - Show which installed packages occupy the most space
  debman       - Easily view man pages from a binary .deb without extracting
  debmany      - Select manpages of installed or uninstalled packages
  checkrestart - Help to find and restart processes which are using old
                 versions of upgraded files (such as libraries)
  popbugs      - Display a customized release-critical bug list based on
                 packages you use (using popularity-contest data)

and also moreutils, which is basically awesome pipe tools on wheels:

Description: additional unix utilities
 This is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought
 to write thirty years ago.
 .
 So far, it includes the following utilities:
  - sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file
  - ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output
  - ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty
  - vidir: edit a directory in your text editor
  - vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe
  - ts: timestamp standard input
  - combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations
  - pee: tee standard input to pipes
  - zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command
  - mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first
  - isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8
  - lckdo: execute a program with a lock held
Homepage: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/moreutils/
8
votes

A great "feature" I use every day at work: The ability to have SSH listen on port 443 so I can create a tunnel which bypasses my work firewall, allowing me to run a local SOCKS proxy tunneled through SSH to my internet facing Linux server.

I can completely ignore my corporate firewall.

4
  • 3
    It always make me chuckle to think of the people who believe that you can "lock down" a network. If leave a single port for traffic to get out on, you're screwed.
    – baudtack
    May 22, 2009 at 23:29
  • what if they see 3GB of data flowing through port 443 from your computer?
    – Wadih M.
    Aug 23, 2010 at 18:05
  • Add corkscrew to the nix, and even https proxies aren't an issue!! Jan 10, 2011 at 2:15
  • @Wadih.M:this is the way:ssh through 443, send back a udp packet from remote machine to another port with netcat.send another udp packet from where you are to the remote machine.congrats.the port is punched.
    – Behrooz
    Apr 23, 2011 at 12:32
8
votes

I've always liked "man hier" for helping people that are new to the system.

8
votes

Perhaps one of the great features of Linux, as opposed to Windows, is that there are next to no hidden features by design. Hopefully if any undocumented features are important enough to know about the community does its job.

7
votes

Here are a few I've used on a regular basis:

  • sar - shows system activity
  • vmstat - virtual memory stats
  • iostat - io stats
  • pkill - like pgrep but allows you to kill the returned process ID
  • xargs -I<string> - allows for replacing strings with piped data
  • at - schedule a task
  • tkdiff - graphical diff utility

These are probably not "hidden", but I find them extremely useful:

  • df -hk - show disk usage in human readable format
  • ls -ltr - list files sorted by date
  • while :; do...done - (Bash) replacement for watch if unavailable
  • perl -e - run a Perl snippet on the command-line
  • free -kt - show memory information (kilobytes w/total)
1
  • I think it's easier to write while true; do ... than while [ 1 ]; do ...
    – ptman
    May 23, 2010 at 17:30
6
votes

Start with this article with some great Linux tricks. My favorite is pstree, which displays your processes in a tree format so you can see which process spawned which.

curl beats the hell out of wget for pretty much anything you would use wget for.

zgrep and zless are great for searching gzipped log files so you don't have to pipe them through gunzip or leave uncompressed stuff around in /var/log.

3
  • Synopsis, for the lazy ;-) 1.pgrep (like ps meets grep) 2.pstree (lists the processes in a tree format) 3.bc (an arbitrary precision calculator language) 4.split (splits large files into chunks) 5.nl (numbers lines) 6.mkfifo (make two commands communicate through a named pipe) 7.ldd (prints shared library dependencies) 8.col (strips out line feeds) 9.xmlwf (checks if an XML document is well formed) 10.lsof (lists open files)
    – username
    May 12, 2009 at 21:13
  • (GNU) ps has flags for printing a tree. Is there anything other than being easier to remember going on for pstree?
    – ptman
    May 23, 2010 at 17:36
  • Why would curl be better than wget? And: zgrep and zless are only the beginning; there is also zcat and zmore.
    – Mei
    May 18, 2011 at 16:55
6
votes

ESC + .

'Pastes' the last parameter from the previous line into the current prompt

e.g.

ls -l /home/someuser/somedir/somefile

followed by

rm ESC + .

translates to

rm /home/someuser/somedir/somefile
1
  • That's awesome. Didn't know that. Jan 19, 2011 at 15:18
5
votes

I see the yes command very nice:

yes | do_you_agree

From man page:

NAME
       yes - output a string repeatedly until killed

SYNOPSIS
       yes [STRING]...
       yes OPTION
5
votes

The concept is that everything in Linux is a file.

All configurations are in text files, and everything in Linux is treated as a file. This is a much simpler approach which makes it very easy to change things in Linux. In Linux even your filesystem itself can be viewed as a file.

1
  • If you like this basic Unix concept, you'll like Plan9 OS.
    – wazoox
    Jun 26, 2009 at 9:46
4
votes

It's open source. Nothing is "hidden" if you bother to look.

5
  • Unfortunately open source tends to make "hidden" things rather difficult for you to look.
    – Spoike
    May 2, 2009 at 6:58
  • 5
    I'd have argued the opposite - if a feature is hidden in a closed source app, it's up to the dev shop to disclose it. In an open source app, the feature is there for everyone to see. Furthermore, the number of people actively developing is generally much larger (more people know and talk about 'hidden' features). Lastly, open source development is largely community oriented, so people generally tell each other about hidden features.
    – Tom Wright
    May 2, 2009 at 15:35
  • I'm not following @Spoike's reasoning at all. Yes, there is more to look at, but what you see is what you get. May 2, 2009 at 16:34
  • I think you're arguing over semantics. How about we rename to "Obfuscated features of linux?"
    – spoulson
    May 5, 2009 at 18:51
  • I would partially argue in Spoike's favor that maybe things are 'hidden' because of the general lack of good up to date documentation. Not to say this statement holds true for all projects, however there are a great deal of projects where full documentation (and I don't mean just how-to user guides) are somewhat lacking. KDE's administrative features, especially in regards to management of settings inside rc files and actual effects of setting a specific field immutable is a perfect example. In many cases I've found myself looking in the source code to find out how things are handled.
    – Jason Mock
    May 30, 2009 at 20:40
4
votes

The hidden feature is that there are no hidden features. The system provides a tremendous amount of power that you have complete access to. You have to understand every piece of it and every tool available to know what power is at your fingertips.

You should start by understanding every command in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and every virtual file in /proc. Read the manpages, other documentation, and source as necessary.

If you aren't comfortable reading a man page or reading the source, that is your hidden feature.

3
votes

grep, awk and sed

top

1
  • 12
    Those aren't very hidden
    – jayrdub
    May 1, 2009 at 21:58
3
votes
  • od - dump files in octal and other formats. Useful to check for example if there's some BOM crap in the beginning of file
  • file - what might be the filetype of given file?
  • lshw, lsusb, lspci - list hardware
  • tracepath - are we dealing with MTU problem here?
  • netwox contains 200+ network related tools
  • ip - for network config/info
  • sysctl - filesystem/network/kernel info
  • ebtables - iptables for bridge
  • vconfig - VLAN configuration
  • brctl - Bridge configuration
  • socat - netcat on steroids
  • ipgrab - tcpdump-like utility that prints detailed header information
  • dig - What's up with DNS server now?
3
votes

tee is awesome. Output to screen and logfile? Check.

3
votes

Just found this one today:

dmidecode:
Reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

It definitely makes answering questions about somerandomserver27 at the colo facility a lot easier!

2
  • You'll like lspci, lsscsi, lsusb too :)
    – wazoox
    Aug 19, 2010 at 10:30
  • Yup, I use the ls* commands on a regular basis - I just didn't realize there was anything that could pull BIOS level info :)
    – gharper
    Aug 20, 2010 at 18:43
3
votes

Not really a Linux thing, more of a Bash thing: process substitution,

diff some_local_file <(ssh somehost "cat some_remote_file")

This diffs a local and a remote file retrieved via SSH in one line.

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