More Linux commands for your scripting pleasure

One of our users, James Lowden, emailed us to say that our recent 77 useful Linux commands and utilities guide missed a couple of his favorites:

I’m a NetBSD guy, but I have RHEL at work.

As for commands, I like:

1. pax better than tar

2. hexdump better than od

3. tnfpt better than wget

Pax has a much better command-line interface than tar, especially for copying trees. Consider:

$ pax -rw -pe src dest # to copy a tree

$ pax -wzf file.pax.gz src # to create and archive

hexdump -C is what you almost always want.

Tnftp (a port of the NetBSD FTP client to other systems) is a much saner way to fetch stuff. Why the GNU world focuses on wget instead is a mystery to me. It doesn’t do anything tnftp doesn’t do, and it doesn’t do anything better, either.

If you would like to share your opinions of our essential Linux command guide, feel free to drop us line and share some of your favorite commands with the Enterprise Linux Log.