In the Unix world in general, with the exception of macOS, the most normal thing is that it depends a lot, a lot on the terminal, leaving the desktop environment in the background on many occasions. As you know, there are many commands we use frequently. But their number is so high that it is difficult to know all of them and some of them we do not usually use too much and others we have not even heard of them.
In this article we will try to present some lesser known or exotic commands that not all users use or do it very occasionally. Some time ago I made an article on this same blog to deal with this same topic, and it is worth remembering it a bit, since both posts can complement each other. In addition, we also made a great list on rare distros, which always tends to generate quite a bit of curiosity among our readers. You can see them here...
We start with this new selection of rare tools, or rather, less everyday:
- termsave: it is a command or tool that can create screensavers or screen savers for our terminal like the ones we use for our graphic environments. The theme of these text-based screensavers is diverse, such as Star Wars, clocks, or Matrix,… If you have the tool installed on your distro, you can use the -h option to get help with its operation and options.
- pv: ps will sound to all of us, another command we use frequently, but this other one will not sound to all of us. In this case you can supervise data copy monitoring and other uses. Among its options are those of controlling the speed or performance of the process, byte counter in transfers, completion time, timer for the process, progress bar, etc.
- calendar: It is not as strange as the previous ones, but surely with the calendar utilities that desktop environments have, few will make use of it. This is a modification of the BSD systems calendar for Linux, but without the phases of the moon and sun. It can be very practical to generate plain text files with our own calendars.
Do you dare to make use of any of them?