Core utilities are the basic, fundamental tools of a GNU/Linux system. This article provides an incomplete overview of them, links their documentation and describes useful alternatives. The scope of this article includes, but is not limited to, the GNU coreutils. Most core utilities are traditional Unix tools (see Heirloom) and many were standardized by POSIX but have been developed further to provide more features.

Most command-line interfaces are documented in man pages, utilities by the GNU Project are documented primarily in Info manuals, some shells provide a help command for shell builtin commands. Additionally most utilities print their usage when run with the --help flag.

Essentials

The following table lists some important utilities which Arch Linux users should be familiar with. See also .

Preventing data loss

rm , mv , cp and shell redirections happily delete or overwrite files without asking. rm , mv , and cp all support the -i flag to prompt the user before every removal / overwrite. Some users like to enable the -i flag by default using aliases. Relying upon these shell options can be dangerous, because you get used to them, resulting in potential data loss when you use another system or user that does not have them. The best way to prevent data loss is to create backups.

Nonessentials

This table lists core utilities that often come in handy.

Package Utility Description Documentation Alternatives shell built-ins alias define or display aliases type print the type of a command time time a command GNU tee read stdin and write to stdout and files , info mktemp make a temporary file or directory , info cut print selected parts of lines , info tr translate or delete characters , info od dump files in octal and other formats , info , vim's sort sort lines , info uniq report or omit repeated lines , info comm compare two sorted files line by line , info head output the first part of files , info tail output the last part of files, or follow files , info wc print newline, word and byte count , info GNU strings print printable characters in binary files , info GNU iconv convert character encodings file guess file type

The package provides useful tools like that are missing from the GNU coreutils.

Alternatives

Alternative core utilities are provided by BusyBox, the Heirloom Toolchest, , AUR and AUR .

cp alternatives

Using rsync#As cp/mv alternative allows you to resume a failed transfer, to show the transfer status, to skip already existing files and to make sure of the destination files integrity using checksums.

ls alternatives

broot — A new way to see and navigate directory trees.

exa — Another ls replacement with color support, tree view, git integration and other features.

lsd — Modern ls with a lot of pretty colors and awesome icons.

find alternatives

fd — Simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find. Ignores hidden and .gitignore 'd files by default.

fuzzy-find — Fuzzy completion for finding files.

mlocate — Merging locate/updatedb implementation.

For graphical file searchers, see List of applications/Utilities#File searching.

diff alternatives

While does not provide a word-wise diff, several other programs do:

git diff can do a word diff with --color-words , using --no-index it can also be used for files outside of Git working trees.

, using it can also be used for files outside of Git working trees. dwdiff — A word diff front-end for the diff program; supports colors.

GNU wdiff — A wordwise implementation of GNU diff; does not support colors.

cwdiff — A GNU wdiff wrapper that colorizes the output.

https://github.com/junghans/cwdiff || AUR , AUR

icdiff — A colorized diff tool written in Python. "Improved color diff" is meant to supplement normal diff use.

https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff || AUR , AUR

See also List of applications/Utilities#Comparison, diff, merge.

grep alternatives

mgrep — A multiline grep.

pdfgrep — A tool to search text in PDF files.

ripgrep-all — Search in plain text and also in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz.

Code searchers

The following three tools aim to replace grep for code search. They do recursive search by default, skip binary files and respect .gitignore .

ack — A Perl-based grep replacement, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

ripgrep (rg) — A search tool that combines the usability of ag with the raw speed of grep.

The Silver Searcher (ag) — Code searching tool similar to Ack, but faster.

Interactive filters

fzf — General-purpose command-line fuzzy finder, powered by find by default.

fzy — A fast, simple fuzzy text selector with an advanced scoring algorithm.

peco — Simplistic interactive filtering tool.

https://github.com/peco/peco || AUR , AUR

percol — Adds flavor of interactive filtering to the traditional pipe concept of the UNIX shell.