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.

    • jaxiiruff
      1•6 days ago

      Cant remember exactly but it had something to do with a file relating to sudo and it only was allowed to be edited with a vim style editor.

      • johant
        1•2 days ago

        The EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables are usually read by command line tools to launch your preferred editor. You could set VISUAL to nano before launching visudo and you would be editing the sudoers file in nano.

      • @[email protected]
        9•6 days ago

        There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.

        You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.

        • azuthEnglish
          12•6 days ago

          But visudo can use any editor if you set SUDO_EDITOR or EDITOR variables. If you don’t want to use vi(m) you should probably set EDITOR in your .bashrc and visudo and probably other programs will use your editor of choice.

      • @[email protected]
        2•6 days ago

        There may be certain times where it’s all that’s available, I think I remember having to edit fstab in some recovery state in vi

      • @[email protected]
        1•5 days ago

        /etc/sudoers?

        you can just edit that with nano or whatever, the visudo thing they tell you to use is goofy and I don’t like it