Interesting LINUX Commands

Are you a person fascinated by Linux and want to explore more?

Let’s look at a few interesting Linux commands that keep blowing my mind each time I look at them:

Photo by Gabriel Heinzer on Unsplash

1. Diff

The diff command compares two text files and shows the differences between them. There are many options to tailor the display to your requirements.

The -y (side by side) option shows the line differences side by side. The -w(width) option lets you specify the maximum line width to use to avoid wraparound lines.

diff -y -W 70 file1 file2 --suppress-common-lines

The — suppress-common-lines prevents diff from listing the matching lines, letting you focus on the lines which have differences.

2. Finger

The finger command gives you a short dump of information about a user, including the time of the user’s last login, the user’s home directory, and the user account’s full name.

finger username

3. Factor

Time for some Mathematics, this command output all the possible factors of a given number.

factor

4. Yes

It is funny but useful as well, specially in scripts and for System Administrators where an automated predefined response can be passed to terminal or generated.

yes Linux commands are awesome!

This prints “Linux commands are awesome!” until you interrupt with ctrl+c.

5. Aview

How about viewing an image in ASCII format on the terminal? We must have a package ‘aview‘ installed, just apt or yum it.

$ sudo apt install aview  [On Debian/Ubuntu & Mint]
$ sudo yum install aview  [On CentOS/RHEL 7]
$ sudo dnf install aview  [On CentOS/RHEL 8 & Fedora]
$ sudo yay -S aview       [On Arch Linux]
$ sudo pkg_add -v aview   [On FreeBSD]

I’ve got an image named ‘elephant.jpg‘ in my current working directory and I want to view it on the terminal in ASCII format.

asciiview elephant.jpg -driver curses

Hope you had fun with these commands because I for sure did!