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Re:Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? by mdip on Monday November 19, 2018 @11:34AM (#18487550)
There are so many to list that I'll skip the more obvious ones (they're well represented in the comments) and pick a few that I've been enjoying a lot lately:

Netflix-Skunkworks/go-jira[0] - Jira interface written in Go that is incredibly flexible.

bat[1] - cat with code highlighting

climate[2] - Shell swiss-army knife of tools

That last one deserves a post on its own. It's certainly not the most portable thing -- requiring that certain binaries be available for some of its functions, but it works as-is for the Linux distributions that I run and provide simple commands for getting information about things that isn't always trivial to remember (such as getting an external IP address of a host from the command-line). Silly things like remembering the CLI options for 'du' (along with the necessary '| sort ... | head -5') are replaced by 'climate biggest-files'. It replaces a mess of tools, but does so, often, by simply calling those tools with the "correct" parameters that I've forgotten.

Yes, a well authored set of aliases for the most common commands would do the same thing, but I end up using 'climate' in cases where the information I need is something I rarely need for a given task and getting that information is going to be a non-obvious exercise involving a few pipes. It's a "kitchen sink" utility with a set of commands that, for the most part, you'd find a hard time grouping them into a single theme -- a command for getting the current weather (after all, it is named climate) next to one to download all files on a web page, next to one to get disk usage stats in a variety of ways. Normally, I don't like tools like this, but this one lands as a big exception to that rule for me.

[0] https://github.com/Netflix-Skunkworks/go-jira

[1] https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

[2] https://github.com/adtac/climate

Re:Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? by Aweorih on Monday November 19, 2018 @12:59PM (#18488263)
> such as getting an external IP address of a host from the command-line.

What about using `ping host`? This also prints the ip

Re:Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? by mdip on Thursday November 29, 2018 @10:02PM (#18566282)
Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear in my statement:

A function that it provides is to display the public IP address from a host behind the NAT.

Another way to do this: `dig @resolver1.opendns.com ANY myip.opendns.com +short`[0] ... it's just trickier to remember. And since dig is a tool for performing DNS lookups, `man dig` doesn't hint at this particular trick.

In fact, I didn't actually remember the command that displays that for `climate`[1], because if I had, I would have written it as `public-ip`, which `climate help` informed me of. :)

[0] ... or if you prefer a more interactive and profane experience, try `lynx wtfismyip.com`

[1] My public IP is displayed on terminal start since I need it with some frequency; Of course, it's displayed as "External IP:", which is something I'll have to remedy.

Re:Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? by sfdgsdfg on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @03:05AM (#18492465)
or "dig host" for a proper dns lookup