Ask HN: What are your top most useful Unix commands? - nns
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DrScump
kill lets you send any signal to a process you have control over.
Corresponding signal handlers allow a wide range of behavior changes.

~~~
ksaj
A lot of people only know about its use for literally killing a process. But
as an example of where I find myself using it fairly often is:

kill -USR1 <dd>

where <dd> is the process ID (obtained from ps) for the dd command.

Instead of killing dd, it reports back how much has been read/copied so far.
Especially useful for working with large files and you decide you want to
guestimate how much longer the copy will take.

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simonblack
ls, find, grep, tar, cpio

But in truth, it's the bash scripting 'glue' that holds everything together.

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kleer001
the semicolon ";" for chaining commands

ls -l

the "alias" command in a file for setting up quick-commands

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antoineMoPa
grep, find, tail -f (useful to look at log files as they update)

Extras: sort, uniq, sed, sftp, apropos, man

~~~
jjjbokma
tail -F

This will also follow a log file if it rotates.

~~~
jolmg
I just found out a few days ago that `-F` works with multiple files, too. When
there's new content on one, tail prefixes the output with a header, telling
you what file it is.

I've used that to watch all logs apache and descendant processes could be
writing to:

    
    
      pstree -p $(pgrep -o apache2) \
      | grep -Po '[^}]\(\K\d+'
      | sed ':b;N;$!bb;s/\n/,/g' \
      | sudo xargs lsof -d 0-1000 -a -p \
      | grep -Po '\S+$' \
      | grep 'log' \
      | sort -u \
      | xargs tail -F

------
apotatopot
top

jk, but also not.

w !sudo tee % in vim, even tho that's not really directly a unix thing?

------
potta_coffee
history | grep <command halfway remember using>

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0x445442
dirs -v pushd popd

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wbsun
cd pwd ls

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runjake
cut, awk, sed, comm, grep

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jolmg
git

------
sgillen
emacs&

------
jjjbokma
find, grep

------
hntddt1
ls

------
chmielewski
time cat

