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Home > Computers > Software > Others > Ten Best Freeware > girish1729's
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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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