Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I’m surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!
Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn’t as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.
I used jq for something similar before, recently I’ve discovered Nu Shell and have been using that for converting and analyzing data since a full shell is a lot more powerful than a command (e.g. open a yaml, for each element on key X grab the first element of list Y and export to a CSV)
Can it handle a file that has corrupt json? Or does it just tell you “no”
See also https://github.com/TomWright/dasel