Been away from linux for 10 years. Which commands have I missed? [closed]

I have been away from linux for some years, but now I'm once again back with Ubuntu 10.04. I used to run Gentoo in 2000 and knew my commands, but now that the world of linux has progressed a bit further, aren't there many new commands to learn?

Do you know a list of linux shell commands that are in broad use now and which didn't exist 10 years ago?

Identified so far: ngrep, sshfs, pv

Solution 1:

I don't know what you used in 2000. Figure out the new ones from an history meme; mine below. I expect command use to follow a long tail. The basics haven't changed, but there's a lot more to pick from.

history |awk '{print $2}' |sort |uniq -c |sort -rnk1,1 |head -n 20 |vipe
    219 ls
    100 git
     92 cd
     91 sudo
     66 <custom>
     64 aptitude
     60 locate
     54 grep
     52 less
     48 mplayer
     45 vim
     43 find
     36 cat
     31 <ssh alias>
     26 <ssh alias>
     24 dpkg
     23 file
     23 df
     21 <pgrep alias>
     20 man

Solution 2:

Actually, you probably haven't missed much. The popular UNIX reference books that were written back in the '70s (or so) are still popular and still useful - the base commands haven't really changed.

The only new thing that comes to mind immediately is the package manager; you might need to get used to the syntax of aptitude and apt-get etc., if you don't use their graphical frontends. There's also version control, i.e. svn and git are new and popular, if you are in to that sort of thing. But they're not exactly core UNIX commands.

Solution 3:

A big difference is now a very comprehensive aid in bash-completion. Makes it a lot easier to use command line.

Solution 4:

You're not going to find much different. A few options here and there. For the most part, especially on systems like Ubuntu, you're going to find that most of the new stuff is GUI.

Concerning new commands, if you are a big of a screen fan as me, you may appreciate the new tmux or byobu.

I had to go back and check on the release dates of a lot of things... Looks like wget (1996), curl (1997), and iptables (1998) were all out a few years before 2000, so those might not be new to you.

Solution 5:

pv - Progress bar for long commands

pv is probably new to you. It provides a progress bar for any program that can accept input from a pipe.

To install (Ubuntu)

apt-get install pv

Example

Show progress as you caclulate a checksum for a large file:

pv large_file | sha1sum