1. expect: “I use expect in some cron jobs to automate many sysadmin tasks that are usually repetitive; things like moving files around all of my desktops and the server and the like.”
2. lft: “lft is like traceroute on steroids. You can get a lot more information than traceroute for debugging connections or just finding where a box/system is.”
3. mc: “It’s the best file manager there is. The transition from DOS to Linux was so much easier since I used Norton Commander on DOS.”
4. sdiff: “sdiff produces a human-friendly description of the differences between two text files. It shows the files side-by-side with the synbols to indicate lines only in the left file, lines that differ between the two files and lines only in the right file. Much easier to read than the output of diff.”
5. xargs: “xargs create command line from data on standard input.”
6. for, while: for, while are used to “loop through a list of items and do something for each one”
7. read: Used to “read lines of text from standard input into shell variables for further processing.”
8. sort: Used to “sort lines of text alphabetically or numerically; supports multiple sort keys.”
9. uniq: Used to “remove duplicated lines from a list.”
10. tr: Used to “translate or delete characters from a text stream.”
11. od: Used to “dump binary files in octal (or hex or binary).”
12. wc: Used to “count words (and characters, and lines) in files.”
13. top: “like vmstat, get a view of how the system is performing, see which processes are hogging all the memory.”
14. ps: “Get details on a specific process.”
15. date: “Useful call to make in a script file to output current information when benchmarking.”
16. env: “To check environment variables on another account to troubleshoot dotfiles.”
17. ln: “Ahhh…softlinks are a must in working on web sites.”
18. mget: “Not used much anymore, but it sure was nice to be ale to handle multiple files with one command
19. nslookup: what’s the real name of a computer … or “Is it safe to go there?”
20. passwd: usually having others issue the command to set a password I may temporarily use
21. ps: usually in conjunction with the “kill” command
22. uname: helpful when working on different computers which may not be in synch at the OS level.
23. whoami: yes, who am I … as in “What userid am I running under?”
