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10 Linux command line utilities
By: girish1729 | Apr 20, 2006 09:33 PM
Pros: What to say here?
Cons: What not to say here?
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Dear reader,
This a very short and pithy summary of the tools I love and use in my
UNIX love affair.
1) netcat or nc
This is known as the networking Swiss army knife. Fortunately this is
available for Windows also now. It is a marvellous little tool that
can do wonders. In fact for my recent seminal work on ''peer to peer
traffic traversal across NATs'' , nc played a great role.
It simplicity of use is as elegant as its power. What all can you do
with it?
You can listen at arbitrary TCP and UDP ports, you can act as a client
and server both, you can specify the client port, you can do port
scanning, you can transfer files, you can chat with each other using
my above work. And you can also do IP spoofing. In the FreeBSD
variant, you can also send and receive IPsec traffic with it. You can
also execute arbitrary commands and send the
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output to the client using nc. You can even run a simple web server
with it. The possibilities are endless.
Now obviously my intention here is not to get into the details since I
want the article to be pithy. I just give you an example for UDP
because I don't know any other tool that can easily talk UDP.
$nc -u -p 1500 <peerip> 1500
at both sides will give you a UDP peer to peer connection. Please
don't mistake me, UDP is not peer to peer, but it lends easily to the
peer to peer model. Now you can transfer files easily by
$nc -u -p 1500 <peerip> 1500 <filename
and
$nc -u -p 1500 <peerip> 1500 >filename to receive the file. Lot more
can be done, but I am running out of space. Please explore yourself,
in case you need help please don't hesitate to contact me.
2) socat
Unfortunately I don't know much about this program. I discovered it
when I wanted a command line UNIX domain socket client and server.
Apparently it is much more powerful. But I will just dwell on what I
know. Pardon me for my ignorance.
$ socat - UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/socket
will act as a UNIX domain socket client where /tmp/socket is the
socket. And
$ socat - UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/socket will act as server.
Much more is possible, it also does TCP stuff, UDP stuff and much much
more. It also supports hundreds of options.
3) openssl
Fortunately I am associated with this for a long time so much that I
am going to write a book on the same.
However I use it as a library than as a command line utility. This is
a full fledged encryption dynamo that can do everything under the sun
imaginable for crypto.
$openssl dgst -md5 <filename
can give you the MD5 checksum of the file.
You can encrypt and decrypt with the command line. You can do *lot* of
things but crypto is not for everyone. It is a very deep science. So
let me leave you there so you can sleep at peace tonight. :-)
4) tr
Most people have not even used it once though everyone has heard of
it. It translates text, it can be used for UNIX to DOS file format
conversion,
$tr -d ''\r''
It can squeeze out blanks lines, delete unwanted characters, squeeze
spaces and so on. It is not feature rich but whatever it does it does
well and it can play very well with other software like figlet (see
below) for some excellent stuff.
$ tr [a-z] [A-Z]
will convert all lowercase to uppercase.
$tr -s ''\n''
will remove duplicate successive blank lines.
5) figlet
Wow! This is really amazing. I have really wondered what people do to
create ASCII graphics. I tried doing it in Vim and failed badly. I
think it should be really painstaking.
And ASCII art looks too good in signatures in email. If you write your
name with it, people will instantly fall in love with you. Don't ask
me how many people fell in love with me! :-) Ha ha! I have never tried
that.
$figlet girish
will type girish in a specific ASCII font. You should necessarily
install the companion package figlist for an exhaustive collection of
fonts.
And of course please don't forget to use it with tr . Fortunately the
man page gives a useful example for that.
6) fortune
If any of my previous employers read this, I think they will beat me
up. Because this is the only game I play. And it is no game at all. It
is very enlightening as Oscar Wilde said,
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of
journalism
in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in
touch with
the ignorance of the community.
-- Oscar Wilde
I think if you are like me( I would like to think you are), then you
will love this.
$fortune -m ''Oscar''
7) mplayer
I misunderstood this section as meaning only command line utilities. I
forgot that I could write about any free software. Anyway mplayer is
also a command line tool only even though it is used to play movies
and audio of any format. Just mplayer and file name in the command
line will take you places.
Pressing the arrow keys do the right thing. Skip multiple frames or
rewind...
8) openuniverse
This is a GUI based galaxy exploration tool, but beware you need a
recent graphics card with 3D capability and also it needs a good CPU.
I have not played much with it, never got around to doing it.
9) windowmaker
The sexiest window manager on UNIX. It wins hands down compared to KDE
or GNOME or any other. It is actually not comparing apples to apples
since Windowmaker is not a desktop but still I have never liked
anything else enough to make a switch. I have not tried xfce much, so
maybe I have not seen enough of the world yet.
It was written by a Brazilian programmer and it is truly classy. It is
the sexiest desktop I have ever seen. Takes a small amount of time to
get used to it but it looks marvellous and is also simple and somewhat
user friendly.
www.windowmaker.org
And of course it is very very very fast even on very old hardware
because it is very slim. I should congratulate GNOME here because
though they got several things wrong, it also works very well on old
hardware because of one single decision, they wrote in C instead of
C++.
10) ssh
ssh and its companion scp are one of the sexiest innovations of the
recent past. As usual OpenBSD folks are very bad at inventing, but
they quickly identify good stuff and come out with something
supernatural. They are very very brilliant, committed folks. In fact
they are so good that in their hackathons, there are really no talks,
only coding.
They have the attitude, ''Shut up and code''. I like it a lot. What
about you?
For mirroring your home directory type,
$ssh -r ~ user@host:
And ssh can also execute remote commands instead of logging in and
giving you a shell. You can just enter
$ssh host ''date''
if you want to know the date at the remote machine.
In fact using the dd command with ssh, you can even transfer arbitrary
input to a remote machine. Almost like accessing a remotely mounted
file system...
And using companion tools like ssh-agent and ssh-add you can login to
machines without entering passwords using an RSA or DSA key pair.
Hope you enjoyed this nice little sojourn. Bye till we meet again in
my next article.
About this Member
MS ID: girish1729
Name: Girish
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