What are the alternatives to basic Linux command line tools? All the old basic tools are often used, and these alternatives provide additional benefits that are useful in many scenarios when connecting to the server remotely. These tools have been modernized and ported to different systems, improving usability, making them the best choice for modern systems.
The basic Linux command line tool alternatives are as follows:
1. As an alternative to du, the ncdu
NCurses Disk Utilization (ncdu) tool provides similar results to du, but in an interactive interface based on curses, it focuses on those directories that take up more disk space.
ncdu will spend some time analyzing the disk, and then display the results based on your most commonly used directories or files.
2.
htop as an alternative to top htop is an interactive process viewer similar to top, but it provides a better out-of-the-box user experience. By default, htop will display the same metrics as top in pleasant colors.
3. As an alternative to man, the tldr
command-line tool displays simplified command usage information, including examples. It serves as a client of the community project tldr pages.
This tool cannot replace man. The man page is still a standardized and complete source of information for many tools. However, in some cases, man provides too much information. Sometimes, you don't need all the information for a command; you just try to remember the basic options. For example, the man page of the curl command has almost 3000 lines. In contrast, curl's tldr page has only 40 lines
4. As an alternative to sed/grep, jq
is a command line JSON processor, similar to sed or grep, but specifically designed to process JSON data. If you are a developer or system administrator who uses JSON in daily tasks, then this is an essential tool in your toolbox.
Compared with general text processing tools such as grep and sed, the main advantage of jq is that it understands the data structure of JSON and allows complex queries to be created using a single expression.
5. As an alternative to find, fd
is a simple and fast alternative to the find command. Its purpose is not to replace all the functions provided by find; on the contrary, it provides some reasonable default values, which can be very useful in certain situations.
For example, when searching for source code files in a directory containing a Git repository, fd will automatically exclude hidden files and directories, including .git directories, and ignore patterns in .gitignore files. In general, it is faster to search and provides more relevant results on the first search.
By default, fd performs a case-insensitive pattern search in the current directory, and the output is colored. Using find to perform the same search requires you to provide additional command line parameters.