Unix and Linux Stack Exchange
Unix and Linux Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [utilities]

small programs used on the command line to do a specific job

Unix shells are primarily glue programs designed to invoke and manage other programs. Many common tasks are performed by small external programs, often called utilities. In unix terminology, utilities include both shell built-ins and external commands.

Utilities with their own tags

  • Text processing, when sed doesn't cut it.
  • Change directory. Related utilities are pushd, pop and dirs to manage a directory stack.
  • Copy files.
  • Print the current (or another) date and time.
  • Process binary data.
  • Look for files in a directory tree.
  • Search a pattern in a file.
  • List the files in a directory.
  • Rename or move files.
  • Remove (delete) files.
  • Simple text processing, mainly regexp replacement.

Utility references

Further reading

320 questions
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3 answers

What is the point of the `yes` command?

This question concerns the yes command found in UNIX and Linux machines: Basically, what is the point (if any) and history of this tool? Are there practical applications for it? Can an example be shown where it is useful in a script or chained (via…
Jaryd Malbin
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11
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2 answers

Command similar to 'yes' but that outputs newlines?

Is there a Linux command similar to yes but one that outputs newlines? Something like $ yes enter That outputs \n\n\n\n\n\n Similar too how yes 'foo' outputs foo foo foo
Jimbo
  • 131
5
votes
2 answers

Factor is too large

I'm trying to use a factor utility but it tells me that number is too large. Is there any utility that can do what factor doing but not tells that number is too large?
hiprivet
  • 160
4
votes
1 answer

Can you do url (percent) encoding with the recode terminal tool

You can use the recode tool to do html encoding and decoding like so: recode html..ascii Can you also do URL-Encoding (percent encoding) with it?
hgiesel
  • 312
3
votes
1 answer

Does a utility exist to show the output of a command in a GUI as well as to the console?

I'm thinking it would be similar to tee, except with a popup window instead of a file. Here is an example of what I mean: echo "hello world" | tee file Puts the output in the file and in the console as input happens from the pipe. echo "hello world"…
zzelman
  • 131
3
votes
6 answers

Interactive cd (directory browser)

Sometimes when working in deeply nested file hierarchies (e.g. Java code) I find it annoying to traverse from one leaf to another. My usual cd-up looks like: $ cd ../../.. # Oops, not enough $ cd .. # one more $ cd .. If I want to edit a file I can…
friendzis
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3
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2 answers

Why do I get a 'conformability error' when I attempt to convert water in GNU units?

I've been using the GNU units program and I seem to think that I should be able to convert water between a volume and a weight. Examples: You have: 1 gram water You want: cm^3 conformability error 1 gram water = 9.80665 kg^2 / m^2 s^2 cm^3 =…
brianegge
  • 133
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2
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1 answer

How to use the -t option of Unix command look

I'm learning the look utility and I don't understand the meaning of the -t option. Can someone show me some examples of it? I read the man page, but still don't know what it exactly means.
mitnk
  • 551
1
vote
1 answer

Format size in bytes as human readable

Is there a standard command that will format a simple value (size in bytes) as a human readable format (similar to the -h switch on du, ls, ...)? eg. echo 1852 | format # should print 1.9K echo 3145728000 | format # should print 3.0G
laktak
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1
vote
3 answers

It is a good idea to download the default Linux utilities?

I am working on a server environment which has almost no executables in its /bin folder, except for some basic ones like ls and ln, but I want other common binaries (like sed, awk, gcc etc.) to be installed. Since there are obviously no package…
nakajuice
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0 answers

Given a yacc grammar, output a program that generates text-file (or graphviz) parse trees?

Rather than generating the normal .tab.c file, generate some .tree.c file, s.t $ .tree text outputs the parse tree of the file text?
extremeaxe5
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0
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3 answers

CLI & Markup language

I often find myself editing files for my personal use that are plaintext. Either those are notes, annotations in project directories or sometimes the output of programs that I annotate. However, sometimes I need to make a "nicer" document out of…
Chris
  • 251
0
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1 answer

unix utility to merge files without space overhead (cat *.txt > merged.txt;rm *.txt in one step)

Is there a utility that dumps a file line by line to stdout and deletes those lines? I have a number of large files that I want to merge via cat. Of course I could do cat *.txt > merged.txt But this will take double the space originally occupied…
luksen
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0
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0 answers

Bash wrapper keeping logs of each command give or take a UI-like experience

Is there any tool that provides the ability to execute a series of bash commands (think cloud server setup), keeping a formatted log of each command along with its output? It would be somewhere between a tool like Ansible / Fabric and running a raw…
matanox
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0
votes
1 answer

Installing the BlueZ Utilities

I need to install the bluez utilities. On this site there are listed six utilities in a table, so I downloaded the latest bluez package bluez-5.33.tar.xz and extracted it. But how can I install these utilities now? I also found the file…
Black
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