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.

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