6 More Unique Linux Utilities You Forgot About

To the depths of /usr/bin once more

Photo by Lukas on Unsplash

We’ve been down the Linux binary rabbit hole before and we’re going to make the trip yet again. In this article we’re going to dig even deeper into the dark corners of /usr/bin and dust off some more intriguing gems. We’ll explore some unique and interesting programs that at first glance might seem obsolete, but are actually still quite useful today.

Let’s put our explorer hats back on and discover even more of the awesome things Linux has to offer us.

1. fold

First up is a really neat little utility that will help you wrap input lines to specific lengths. The length can be defined in bytes or spaces. Using the fold utility you can quickly tame files with varying run-on lengths.

For example, let’s assume we have an input line that is six characters long. We want to limit each line to only five characters and wrap the remainder. Using fold we can do this with the following command:

echo "123456" | fold -w 5

The corresponding output should be:

12345
6

Now we can quickly force some text to conform to our length restrictions. This is really handy if you want to break down long streams of text or enforce line length limitations on code or other configuration files.

Check out the wiki for more details on using fold.

2. column

This is another super useful formatting utility. The column utility helps you create columns in text output and even generate whole tables, all from the command-line.

There are other ways to achieve the same thing using utilities like awk but the column utility is geared towards this specific use so that makes it incredibly simple to use, and remember the syntax for.

If we wanted to build a simple table based on a few lines of input, we could execute the following command:

echo -e "one two three\n1 2 3\n111111 222222 333322" | column -t

The output of this command should look like this:

one     two     three
1       2       3
111111  222222  333322