Useful nix utilities

Orion

Might be handy as a sticky if people contribute. Basically useful little utilities that you can't live without once you start using them.

I'll get the ball rolling:

Yakuake (in Debian repos): Terminal which scrolls down from top of screen a la Quake terminal. It's for KDE but works fine in Gnome too. Handy for kicking things off and scrolling back up to leave them running out of the way.
mrxvt: Multi-tabbed terminal. DE independant.
Notecase: hierarchical note manager. Quite simply brilliant.

liamo

screen

A marvelous little utility that allows you to detach from a running session while leaving it running in the background.

Particularly useful if you're working on a remote machine with dodgy internet. If your ssh session gets disconnected - no problem. Reconnect when it comes back and simply re-attach to your still-running session.

Khannie

for loops!

for i in *; do echo "filename is $i"; done

larryone

I used to use screen all the time.

reverse history search in bash.
Ctrl-r and type in a couple of characters. Ctrl-r again for the next match, etc...

FruitLover

++ for yakuake and screen. There's a Gnome-oriented equivalent of yakuake called 'tilda' if you don't want to have to install konsole etc, but IMO yakuake works better.

syklops

Useful nix utilities?

All of nix is useful utilities!!!

Anyhoo, screen++, also for yakuake, though I have the habit of using alt + Tab, for manouvering windows, and alt + tab seems to get confused with yakuake.

After years of using RPM I have to add apt to this list. It is just fantastic! I don't understand why other distro's waste time trying to invent new package managers when apt works so well.

Using the tunneling feature of ssh is also very cool.

Thats all I can think of short of just listing the contents of /bin

Khannie

freenx / nx (www.nomachine.com). Absolutely savage remote desktop application. Using it right now to write this.

Skrynesaver

First Yakuake is definitely the business and while others have recomended yum, I tend to agree on the apt tools, never happier since I switched from RPM, but that may be me not staying current as new tools became available.

So if I can't have Perl does Vim count ? (see subject)

Wget for generating local documentation and generally just mirroring stuff

imageMagick's convert in particular for batch processing files

And loads I've forgotten about, for inspiration take a look at the Debian package of the day site

Orion

What's the edit limit on posts? Thought it was a month and was going to edit the first post to include the others listed. Forgot about ImageMagick - it does kick ass. And FreeNX is fantastic for remote desktop.

Like that Package of the Day site. Today's is EasyTag - for batch manipulating ID3 tags - me likey. That'll be added to my RSS reader

Capt'n Midnight

testdisk saved my partitions more than once and it includes photorec

FruitLover

Nmap and netcat are two utilities I use pretty much every day (particularly nc)

Does rsync count?

Capt'n Midnight

ddrescue

bc -l
scale 1000
a(1)*4