moreutils - a collection of useful UNIX tools

'moreutils' is a fantastic general purpose collection of useful UNIX tools. It was developed to be additional go to command line tools.

Installation

• Install on Ubuntu or Linux Mint 

$ sudo apt-get install -y moreutils


ifdata - quickly gather network data

• Quick way view network information without grep's of ifconfig
• Print interface information

 $ ifdata -p eth0
192.168.0.111 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.255 1500

•  Reports interface existence via return code

$ ifdata -e eth1 && echo "Eth1 exists" || echo "No Eth1"
No Eth1

• It has many other options and is really useful for scripts

  ts - timestamp input

• Adds a timestamp to the beginning of each line of input
• Useful for data gathering or backup scripts
• Example to gather disk usage

$ df -h /home/ | ts > disk.tmp
$ cat disk.tmp
Jun 15 16:52:10 Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
Jun 15 16:52:10 /dev/sda7       183G   33G  141G  20% /home

vidir edit directory contents in a text editor

• If no directory is specified teh current directory is used
• Each item in the directory will appear on its own numbered line
• Delete lines to remove files from the directory
• Edit filenames to rename files

$ vidir experimental/

sponge - allows pipes that read from and write to the same file

• Reads standard input and writes it out to the same file
• If you grep for a value and try to write back to the same file it will wipe out the file

$ grep Complete backup > backup
grep: input file ‘backup’ is also the output
$ cat backup

• Using sponge avoids having to create temporary files

$ grep Complete backup | sponge backup
$ cat backup
Jun 15 16:50:25 “Complete”

•  The grep results are stored in memory before being written back to the file