5 Essential Linux tools replacements and how to install them

I never liked the syntax of several linux commands. I can’t use find to find files. top was never top choice for process monitor (well, I was spoiled by Windows). And in the end, I’m too lazy to read mans. I need tl;dr.

And then I see this article about 5 linux essential tools replacements. It’s like someone read my mind (or old linux tools are really not so much comfortable).

The list of tools mentioned in the article:

ncdu  //instead of du
htop  //instead of top
tldr  //instead of man
jq    //instead of sed/grep for json files
fd    //instead of find

But not everithing is great. Because those tools are not standard yet, and in Centos 7 most of them is not installed trivially.

fd

To get a fd working on centos, I had to download .tar.gz file from github releases page, untar it (hey, this one could use a modern version too) and install to /usr/local/bin directory.

wget https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/releases/download/v8.1.1/fd-v8.1.1-arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf.tar.gz
tar -xvf fd-v8.1.1-arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf.tar.gz
cd fd-v8.1.1-arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf
cp ./fd /usr/local/bin/
cp ./fd.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
mandb

tldr

Note that tldr’s pagea are in internet and this client needs curl to be installed in order to work. Installation instructions:

cd /usr/local/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raylee/tldr/master/tldr
chmod +x tldr

ncdu && htop && jq

These utilities got it’s way into CentOS repositories and can be installed with yum install -y ncdu htop jq.

credits:

fd installation

tldr client