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| General General questions about the FreeBSD operating system. Ask here if your question does not fit elsewhere. |
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#1
December 3rd, 2012, 10:09
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Interesting base system programs you may not know about...
A while ago FreeBSD forum user Beastie brought to my attention a great little program: math/units which is part of the base system.
So I was wondering if anybody knows of any other useful / interesting base-system gems which may have been overlooked? If you know one, post it here! 
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#2
December 3rd, 2012, 15:09
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If you list the contents of /usr/bin/ you'll see similarly spirited utilities like bc, calendar, ncal.
One program in /usr/bin/ that I find helpful is tee. With it, you can do something like % prog | tee outfile and you get prog's output sent to standard output and outfile.
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nickednamed (December 4th, 2012) | ||
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#3
December 5th, 2012, 09:03
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Netcat! Often overlooked
 printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc host.example.com 80See nc(1) for more examples. And I also like dc(1) instead of bc(1). Mainly because it uses RPN (I'm a big fan) and it can do hexadecimal conversions. Code:
dice@molly:~$ dc 16i C0 p 192
__________________
Senior UNIX Engineer at Unix Support Nederland Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
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nickednamed (December 10th, 2012) | ||
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#4
December 5th, 2012, 18:09
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fmt(1) has a nice little wordwrap function. And there's jot(1), which I can't recall using but certainly can do lots of weird things.
Unix Power Tools has a lot of classic command examples.
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nickednamed (December 10th, 2012) | ||
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#5
December 10th, 2012, 15:01
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Thanks guys.
Can't believe how much easier shell scripting will be after checking some of these out; it's like someone already thought of most of the things I want to do. It's a pity that the shell scripting books I have read [and largely forgotten!] had only, grep, cut, cat, echo, sed, and a few others I'm sure. I have actually been going through usr/bin and reading randomly selected programs' man pages, but some of them are a bit esoteric, so it's always nice to see how real people actually use these programs for real life problems, especially in combination.
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#6
December 10th, 2012, 17:25
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In my opinion there's only so much one can learn from a conventional UNIX book. Once you've read one and understand the basics, you're probably better served with Tips&Tricks kind of books (UNIX Power Tools, BSD Hacks, that sort of thing). Also, choosing random commands from /usr/(s)bin and reading up on what they do is a good way of learning, as you've already discovered. And don't forget the FreeBSD fortune(6) cookies.
Fonz
__________________
It's self-perpetuating a parahumanoidarianised. -- Queen: "Back to Humans" (best song lyric ever)
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nickednamed (December 14th, 2012) | ||
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| base, port, program, units |
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