Expansions
The moreutils package expands the standard tools for the shell with useful and sometimes exotic tools.
moreutils completes the shell's toolbox
|
Sergei Koltovich, 123RF
The shell lets you string together a myriad of discrete tools to solve complex tasks. Often the Coreutils utilities from the util-linux package are enough. There are, however, a number of situations that still don't have a standard solution in the form of a tool.
Together with some friends, Joey Hess has developed a set of programs grouped under the name moreutils [1] to fill some of these gaps. For the most part, these are specialized tools. Consequently, it is entirely possible that you have never heard of any of them. But if you spend a lot of time on the command line, then it would be a good idea to keep these small programs handy.
The current version of moreutils includes 15 programs (see Table 1). Each program is a nifty little tool that comes with a few options and is designed to accomplish a particular task. The tools were developed along the lines of classic Unix tools, so they work with a syntax that shares underlying similarities and concepts. There is a man page for each program; unfortunately, these are not very informative. See the "Installing moreutils" box for installation information.
[...]
Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).
Buy this article as PDF
Express-Checkout as PDF
Pages: 7
Price $0.99
(incl. VAT)
(incl. VAT)
Buy Ubuntu User
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Accelerated command processing with GNU Parallel
With the snazzy little program GNU Parallel, you can make use of the full power of your multicore CPUs through scripts.
-
Tools you should know about
The Ubuntu toolbox is jam-packed with interesting stuff. So much so, it is sometimes easy to miss what you really need. In this issue, we'll try and solve that.
-
Small shell tools for text editing
With the jack-of-all-trades sed, you can certainly master any kind of text manipulation, but the result is often complex and hard-to-remember syntax. The helpers presented in this article replace or enhance sed for many smaller text editing tasks.
-
Find binary-like files with ssdeep
Normal checksums are used to identify "identical" files. The ssdeep tool is used for finding files that are similar in terms of content.
-
lsof finds, shows, and searches data streams
lsof give you a comprehensive list of all open files, be it a regular file, a library, a network file, or a data stream. We show you how to use lsof and how to make things easy with a simple graphical interface.