As software writers, we spend much time reading code, writing code, browsing it, searching things on it, breaking it, fixing it, etc. All for the sake of a good behavior in a component/module we try to build.

During this process there are several opportunities in which you need something, a tool, that helps you find and do things quickly, and perhaps an IDE is an overkill when you have several things opened. So there's the shell, and with it, a lot of applications.

Normally these are the tools I most use during my daily work:
  • find - Whenever you wanna search files by name and many other options, it's mandatory.
                     $> # I'm trying to get all build reports from the projects
                     $> find /opt/projects -iname *report.html
  • grep - Excellent tool to search patterns and strings within files
                      $> # what if want to check for all logs containing the ERROR level?
                     4> grep -nHr --include="*.log" "ERROR" /opt/servers/logs/
  • tmux - Multiple SSH connections are not a problem anymore, just install tmux and create sessions within a single SSH connection.

  • tar - Mandatory tool for packaging and compressing data
                      $> tar cvfz db_dumps.tar.gz *.sql
  • watch - Lets you execute a command or script within a defined interval, helpful for monitoring things
                      $> watch -n 10 "du -hs /opt/packages"
  • xargs - Pipelines!!, who doesn't use them!? with this utility you can easily pass output data to another application
                      $> # delete all my missing files from the repo
                      $> hg missing | xargs hg rm
  • jed - Must have a simple shell editor, I prefer jed over all of them.
  • ssh - Server connections are a must have when deploying applications, learn how to use it.
  • scp - Copy files through an SSH connection without problems.
  • wget - Get those HTTP files easily, use wget.