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Seth David Schoen | 14 Feb 2011 04:46

Great recent Unix software

(Originally posted to the SVLUG list, but I'm going to post here
too because I also suspect this thread might have been on
linux-elitists.)

Hi everybody,

I'm writing a Unix guide for a friend.  My ongoing search for
what to mention, together with Eric's reference to agrep here,
reminded me of a mailing list thread from about a decade ago,
perhaps here on the SVLUG list, where people mentioned the programs
that they would want people to know about that had been developed
recently and wouldn't have been a part of older Unix documentation
(or some long-time Unix users' education).  Some examples mentioned
at the time were ssh, screen, and rsync, all of which were invented
or became popular in the mid-1990s.

(It turns out screen is considerably older than the other two,
but it didn't reach its wide popularity until later.)

Can anyone suggest a new round of Unix software like this?  Things
you use regularly that you wish you'd had when you started using
Unix?  I'm particularly interested in text-mode software so I would
exclude things like Audacity but include things like git.

Or, what software do you install from optional packages that you're
tempted to think should become a default part of all Unix systems?
I think my newest example here is vipe, from GNU moreutils.

--

-- 
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Greg KH | 14 Feb 2011 05:32
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Re: Great recent Unix software

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 07:46:35PM -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Or, what software do you install from optional packages that you're
> tempted to think should become a default part of all Unix systems?
> I think my newest example here is vipe, from GNU moreutils.

moreutils is great, which reminds me, I need to go update the gentoo and
opensuse package of it...

Other things I can't live without that were not around in the
mid-1990's:
	- offlineimap
	- git
	- tig
	- ack
	- quilt

thanks,

greg k-h
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Ben Finney | 14 Feb 2011 06:05
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Greg KH <greg <at> kroah.com> writes:

> Other things I can't live without that were not around in the
> mid-1990's:
[…]
> 	- ack

$ aptitude show ack
Package: ack
State: not installed
Version: 1.39-12
Priority: extra
Section: text
Maintainer: Masayuki Hatta (mhatta) <mhatta <at> debian.org>
Uncompressed Size: 98.3 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1)
Description: Kanji code converter
 ACK is a highly versatile Kanji code checker/converter.  ACK can do
 reciprocal conversion among Japanese EUC, Shift-JIS and 7bit JIS. JIS
 Kata-kana(SJIS Han-kaku Kana) is also supported.  Kanji code can be
 automatically detected even if the input stream contains Kata-kana
 characters.  Besides, ACK can be used as a Kanji code checker with very
 high detection rate.

What have I missed?

--

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Matthew Palmer | 14 Feb 2011 06:39
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Re: Great recent Unix software

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 04:05:09PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Greg KH <greg <at> kroah.com> writes:
> 
> > Other things I can't live without that were not around in the
> > mid-1990's:
> [???]
> > 	- ack
> 
> $ aptitude show ack

You want ack-grep on Debian.  Personally, I've never seen the point of it. 
People rave about it, but don't provide any "gee wow" examples.

> What have I missed?

Nothing much.

- Matt

--

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and mainly only popular due to inertia and people who don't really know what    
they're doing.
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Greg KH | 14 Feb 2011 07:13
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Re: Great recent Unix software

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 04:39:38PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 04:05:09PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> > Greg KH <greg <at> kroah.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Other things I can't live without that were not around in the
> > > mid-1990's:
> > [???]
> > > 	- ack
> > 
> > $ aptitude show ack
> 
> You want ack-grep on Debian.  Personally, I've never seen the point of it. 
> People rave about it, but don't provide any "gee wow" examples.

Actually, 'cgvg' is better, I use it more, but ack is still better for
those times you could use grep instead.

thanks,

greg k-h
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Dave Täht | 14 Feb 2011 07:39
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Seth David Schoen <schoen <at> loyalty.org> writes:

> (Originally posted to the SVLUG list, but I'm going to post here
> too because I also suspect this thread might have been on
> linux-elitists.)
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'm writing a Unix guide for a friend.  My ongoing search for
> what to mention, together with Eric's reference to agrep here,
> reminded me of a mailing list thread from about a decade ago,
> perhaps here on the SVLUG list, where people mentioned the programs
> that they would want people to know about that had been developed
> recently and wouldn't have been a part of older Unix documentation
> (or some long-time Unix users' education).  Some examples mentioned
> at the time were ssh, screen, and rsync, all of which were invented
> or became popular in the mid-1990s.
>
> (It turns out screen is considerably older than the other two,
> but it didn't reach its wide popularity until later.)
>
> Can anyone suggest a new round of Unix software like this?  Things
> you use regularly that you wish you'd had when you started using
> Unix?  I'm particularly interested in text-mode software so I would
> exclude things like Audacity but include things like git.

Gnugol. But then again I wrote it. 

http://gnugol.taht.net
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Don Marti | 14 Feb 2011 14:33

Re: Great recent Unix software

git and associated tools are certainly part of the
canon now (Just saw an ad for cheap web hosting that
mentioned only 3 software packages: PHP, MySQL, git.)

Anyone else get some use out of xml2 and 2xml?
  http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/xml2/

Don't know if Unison is recent enough to count,
but it's useful.

(sorry about the extra approval in this thread  --
missed the resent copy)

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Teh Entar-Nick | 14 Feb 2011 14:52
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Don Marti:
> git and associated tools are certainly part of the canon now (Just saw
> an ad for cheap web hosting that mentioned only 3 software packages:
> PHP, MySQL, git.)

A pity it's impossible to use compared to mercurial or bazaar.  Maybe in
2020 there will be a version with sane user defaults.

> Anyone else get some use out of xml2 and 2xml?
>   http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/xml2/

Hell of yes.

> Don't know if Unison is recent enough to count, but it's useful.

It's spooky, though, in a way that pure rsync isn't.

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Dave Täht | 14 Feb 2011 04:57
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Seth David Schoen <schoen <at> loyalty.org> writes:

> Can anyone suggest a new round of Unix software like this?  Things
> you use regularly that you wish you'd had when you started using
> Unix?  I'm particularly interested in text-mode software so I would
> exclude things like Audacity but include things like git.

Gnugol. But then again, I wrote it.

http://gnugol.taht.net/

>
> Or, what software do you install from optional packages that you're
> tempted to think should become a default part of all Unix systems?
> I think my newest example here is vipe, from GNU moreutils.

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Adam Sampson | 14 Feb 2011 13:23
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Seth David Schoen <schoen <at> loyalty.org> writes:

> Can anyone suggest a new round of Unix software like this?

Most of these aren't that recent, of course...

strace -- absolutely invaluable for debugging configuration and
weird-behaviour problems.

sshfs -- mount remote filesystems using FUSE and ssh.

maildrop -- filter mail in arbitrary ways. This replaced procmail for me
a few years ago.

calc -- David I. Bell's superior bc replacement. (This isn't widely
packaged; I normally find myself using octave or python instead on
machines that don't have it.)

units -- unit conversion.

gnuplot -- generate various kinds of charts.

ecasound -- real-time audio processing: recording/playing back sound,
doing live effects, etc.

ffmpeg -- audio/video format conversion and processing. Handles pretty
much anything these days.

GraphicsMagick/netpbm -- image format conversion, processing and
compositing.
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Nathaniel Smith | 14 Feb 2011 20:32
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Re: Great recent Unix software

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 4:23 AM, Adam Sampson <ats <at> offog.org> wrote:
> netcat -- connect pipelines to arbitrary sockets. (Although I've still
> not trained my fingers out of using telnet for this...)

I believe socat is the canonical modern tool for this purpose.

The other new tool I find indispensible is also one I wrote -- 'xpra'.
Basically screen for X programs. (I'm being a bad maintainer... need
to get a release out! But it mostly Just Works, modulo keymap
difficulties.)

-- Nathaniel
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Don Marti | 14 Feb 2011 20:56

Re: Great recent Unix software

begin Nathaniel Smith quotation of Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:32:34AM -0800:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 4:23 AM, Adam Sampson <ats <at> offog.org> wrote:
> > netcat -- connect pipelines to arbitrary sockets. (Although I've still
> > not trained my fingers out of using telnet for this...)
> 
> I believe socat is the canonical modern tool for this purpose.
> 
> The other new tool I find indispensible is also one I wrote -- 'xpra'.
> Basically screen for X programs. (I'm being a bad maintainer... need
> to get a release out! But it mostly Just Works, modulo keymap
> difficulties.)

If you want to include X tools, xsel is from 2001...
  http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/#download
and the xautomation tools can be useful (I've only used xte)

I have also used Devil's Pie, but don't have it set
up anywhere currently.

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Seth David Schoen | 14 Feb 2011 21:02

Re: Great recent Unix software

Don Marti writes:

> If you want to include X tools, xsel is from 2001...
>   http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/#download

I was trying to find something that did that!  I had been doing

gedit foo.txt
Ctrl-A

(mainly for pasting text files' contents into web forms).

--

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Ben Finney | 14 Feb 2011 22:09
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Adam Sampson <ats <at> offog.org> writes:

> maildrop -- filter mail in arbitrary ways. This replaced procmail for
> me a few years ago.

I really want to love ‘sieve’ (any implementation, but GNU Sieve is the
obvious one).

But the chip implanted in my brain refuses to let me learn anything that
requires ugly camelCaseNames. Not even if it's an RFC.

> units -- unit conversion.

Definitely. It sounds quite trivial when one first hears about it, but
it becomes as indispensable as a calculator.

Maybe it would become less useful if the USA joined the rest of the
world in a sensible measurement system, but I don't see that happening
any time soon.

> lftp -- command-line FTP/HTTP client with mirroring and various other
> useful features.

How does one choose between ‘lftp’, ‘wget’, and ‘curl’?

--

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  `\     have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither |
_o__)                       on your side, pound the table.” —anonymous |
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Shlomi Fish | 14 Feb 2011 18:04
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Re: Great recent Unix software

On Monday 14 Feb 2011 05:46:35 Seth David Schoen wrote:
> (Originally posted to the SVLUG list, but I'm going to post here
> too because I also suspect this thread might have been on
> linux-elitists.)
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I'm writing a Unix guide for a friend.  My ongoing search for
> what to mention, together with Eric's reference to agrep here,
> reminded me of a mailing list thread from about a decade ago,
> perhaps here on the SVLUG list, where people mentioned the programs
> that they would want people to know about that had been developed
> recently and wouldn't have been a part of older Unix documentation
> (or some long-time Unix users' education).  Some examples mentioned
> at the time were ssh, screen, and rsync, all of which were invented
> or became popular in the mid-1990s.
> 
> (It turns out screen is considerably older than the other two,
> but it didn't reach its wide popularity until later.)
> 
> Can anyone suggest a new round of Unix software like this?  Things
> you use regularly that you wish you'd had when you started using
> Unix?  I'm particularly interested in text-mode software so I would
> exclude things like Audacity but include things like git.
> 
> Or, what software do you install from optional packages that you're
> tempted to think should become a default part of all Unix systems?
> I think my newest example here is vipe, from GNU moreutils.

Stuff I can remember now:
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Teh Entar-Nick | 14 Feb 2011 18:25
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Shlomi Fish:
> 2. tmux - screen done right. 

Anti-GPL muppetry aside, tmux fixes a lot of long-standing problems with
screen and keeps a tight focus.  One important thing it does right is to
support actual UTF-8, and not just "UTF-8 of any codepoint in the BMP,
because we use UCS-2 internally just like MS-Windows and Java."  It has
a fantastic subcommand-based configuration syntax, so my .tmux.conf
looks like:

	set-option -g prefix C-]
	unbind-key C-b
	unbind-key ]
	unbind-key C-]
	bind-key ] send-prefix
	bind-key C-] last-window

	set-option -g default-terminal screen-256color-bce
	set-option -g terminal-overrides "xterm:colors=256"

	# Set up a statusline rasher likes
	set-option -g status-utf8 on
	set-option -g status-bg default
	set-option -g status-fg colour128
	set-option -g status-left "#H: "
	set-option -g status-right "#[fg=green]#H #[fg=yellow] %Y-%m-%d %H:%M "
	set-window-option -g window-status-current-fg colour134
	set-window-option -g clock-mode-style 24

So I tested each one of these by running e.g. "tmux set-window-option -g
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Greg Folkert | 14 Feb 2011 18:40
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Re: Great recent Unix software

Resend, as I have to get out of "corporate mode". Don, ignore the
previous message(s).

On Mon, 2011-02-14 at 17:25 +0000, Teh Entar-Nick wrote:
> Their whining about the GPL in all the literature does sour me on the
> development community, though.  The GPL won, guys.  It's doing its job
> fabulously.

I wonder how the Bike Shed is coming along. And is Brett Glass a member
of that community?

Nick, I agree with you and others that the GPL won. It is in fact the
whole reason Free Software got a foot hold and most of it getting
slurped up into a commercial application and becoming closed.

Business Friendly says the BSD License(s) people... shyeah... right, it
is, but its not End User Friendly.
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