Favorite/most useful command you could not live without?
 

Hi i was just curious if people had a favorite comand line command or trick they could not live without and why. im curious to see peoples responses.

less - after years of 'more', less was a real breath of fresh air. It scrolls up as well as down & has a search function as well. Huge improvement!

Put me down for "find" as the killer command.
 

Some "big iron" UNIX's "more" command does this as well. Linux's didn't ever seem to, though. Drives me a bit crazy when I get onto some of the systems at work, most of which don't have "less".

I'm something like "ls" addicted. Every time I enter a directory I run it. Every time I login I run it. Even when I don't need it. It just happens automatially.

About "more useful/serious" commands, "less" is really good stuff...

It's a hard question to answer. Obviously you can't function without a lot of things and tend to use a lot of commands a lot however you especially feel about them, like 'cd' and 'ls'. And some apps are just extremely nifty things, like 'screen', but that's just a console app and I assume we're talking strict CLI. And picking one favorite - I dunno. But find, sed, grep, sort, uniq. And 'df' and 'free' and 'ps' and 'top'. And 'kill'. And 'file'. And 'which'. And 'locate' - I go bonkers on systems without locate. And on and on.

I think I'd have to say 'sed'. if I really had to pick one, though I'm a few light years from being really good with it.

I do love less, though.

:echo $LESS
-eFMRXj12s

Then I'm a happy camper.

"mc" - gotta have Midnight Commander whenever I'm in a console ;)