10 seldom or never used GNU/Linux commands

Guess how many commands are there in GNU/Linux ? My estimate is somewhere between 1000 and 2000. And how did I arrive at this conclusion ? In my bare bones Linux installation alone, there are 1151 commands. I got this figure by running the following command :

$ ls /usr/bin /bin /sbin /usr/sbin |wc -l
1151

And each of these commands or a majority of them can be combined together to perform complex tasks, in which case, these combinations can be considered to be whole commands in their own right. Naturally, it is a humongous task to master all the 1000s of commands available in GNU/Linux. More importantly, it is easier to ignore many commands which make very good replacements of some of the commonly used commands at least for certain functions.

Brock Noland has compiled a collection of 10 commands on his site *cough* "bash cures cancer", which are seldom used by a majority of GNU/Linux users but which in his opinion are a boon for all Linux users if only they knew about them. The commands are pgrep, pstree, bc, split, nl, mkfifo, ldd, col, xmlwf and lsof . He claims that his favorite of the 10 commands is surely mkfifo. But to know why, you should read his article. He has also provided a number of examples of usage of the commands which makes it an informative read.

Two repositories of Linux and Unix commands and example dot files

Does your job involve writing complex bash commands ? Or perhaps you are interested in learning tips and tricks on writing versatile dotfiles. Well, here are two sites which are dedicated to collecting useful tips so as to help Linux users better.

Shell-fu - Is a great site with a growing collection of command line goodies. What makes it interesting is that there are multiple combinations of commands which achieve different tasks. And users can submit and vote for their favorite commands.

Dot files - If you precede a file with a dot, it is considered as a hidden file in Linux. There are numerous hidden files in Linux. The standard ones being .bashrc, .profile, .Xdefaults, .xinitrc and so on. But it doesn't limit to these files. Many applications create hidden files too.

Enter the following command in your terminal to see the hidden files in your home directory.

$ ls -a

This site is a repository of collections of dot files. The files are contributed by its visitors and are divided into different sections namely .vimrc, .screenrc, .bashrc, .zshrc, .Xdefaults, .conkyrc, .irbrc, .bash_profile, .xinitrc and .emacs.