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What are your must-have command line tools?

S

_-_Specter_-_

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 20, 2020
7
1
What are some of the best terminal tools that you use? They can be terminal replacments, packages downloaded with brew, or any other tools to do with the command line.
 
I mean brew itself needs to be on pretty much any Mac user's list I feel.

And I guess the basic ones that often go unmentioned because they're so basic; cd, ls, mv, cp, etc.
In terms of things I use a lot, nmap and nc are super useful for penetration testing and messing around with your own servers.
I also use ssh a lot to tunnel into my Raspberry Pi web server, so that's very useful as well.
htop is great.

pv is really nice when you do big dd data transmissions and such.
I use nano quite a lot because it's so quick and easy to get to and use and it's everywhere, though I also use vim a good bit.
I use command line REPLs like swift and a java one as well

So yeah, lots of nice ones
 
Brew itself, obviously.

I assume we aren't talking about basic commands used for file manipulation (copying, moving, renaming, creating directories, writing lists to a file etc). Sometimes it takes seconds to perform a task that hangs the GUI for hours

I also assume we are not talking about development tools like programming languages, version control systems, task runners, servers, etc because those workflows are specific to what you do

For more casual use, other than basic commands above, I frequently use speediest-cli to check my connection, youtube-dl to download videos I want to keep long term, various image optimizers to compress the file if it needs to be uploaded somewhere. I use awk for processing, modifying and cleaning up text files.

I also use Alfred app to run some CLI commands without actually launching the terminal (works great for things like stripping copied text of all formatting with pbpaste for example) and TextBar for placing the output of some CLI commands into a menubar (remaining disk space, unread mail count, site status, song playing etc)
 
rsync

...particularly for uploading changes to websites etc. via ssh.

ffmpeg

...for multimedia file conversion.

For one off jobs, the desktop alternatives like Transmit and Handbrake are, of course, great, but if you have a repetitive and/or recurring job, nothing beats a shell script using tools like these (Automator ought to be the solution but it is a lottery whether the apps you need support Automator actions).
 
ffmpeg
mkvmerge
rsync
ssh

Guaranteed to have been used recently. Along with many of the built in functions of the shell on a regular daily basis. I always have several terminal windows open to switch between the various machines I am logged into via the ssh session open in them.
 
tn5250 ( not sure if this fits the tool requirements listed )
ssh
rsync
nano ( I know, I know... but I like it and use it )
npm
 
960design said:
nano ( I know, I know... but I like it and use it )
Click to expand...

nano is great, man. Don't feel embarrassed :). It doesn't have the power and flexibility of something like vim or emacs, but it also has simplicity and elegance. A lot of the time our edits are small and not hour or day long text-editing, and nano is great for that :)
 
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