It tends to be difficult to prove uselessness in the unixy world because people can get quite creative with commands in shell scripts. Tools that may appear to be useless to some could be indispensable to others. And as the saying goes: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Following our six cool unixy command entry, here’s the uncool list of unixy commands. So here’s to hoping this short list is no one’s favorite!

ddate – converts Gregorian dates to Discordian dates

According to Wikipedia:

Discordianism is the modern religion worshipping Eris (also known as Discordia), the Greco-Roman Goddess of Chaos.

Ok… Next.

: – No effect; the command does nothing. A zero exit code is returned.

“:” is a built-in Bash command and not a binary per se. It does nothing… But its main use remains in the dark side of computing – shell fork bombing (Caution: :(){ :|:& };:).

yes – output a string repeatedly until killed

yes is the annoying one. It takes quite a bunch of Ctrl-C’s to kill it. But it’s there for the curious cat. And do you know what happened to that cat? yes…

dir – list directory contents

Long live MS-DOS!