15 Must‑Have CLI Tools to Supercharge Your IT Operations
Discover a curated list of fifteen powerful command‑line utilities—from fast file searchers and interactive Git viewers to multi‑threaded downloaders and terminal session recorders—that can dramatically improve productivity and monitoring for system administrators and DevOps engineers.
1. ag : a recursive file‑content search tool that is faster than grep and ack.
2. tig : an interactive text‑mode interface for Git repositories that can replace many Git commands.
3. mycli : a MySQL client with syntax highlighting and auto‑completion, similar to IPython, usable as a drop‑in replacement for the standard mysql command.
4. jq : a JSON processor that formats and highlights JSON data, serving as an alternative to python -m json.tool.
5. shellcheck : a static analysis tool for shell scripts that detects syntax errors and non‑standard coding practices.
6. fzf : a fuzzy finder for the command line that enables interactive, intelligent searching of files or content, perfect for pairing with Ctrl‑R history searches.
7. PathPicker (fpp) : automatically detects directories and files in command‑line output, offering an interactive selector that is especially useful with Git.
git diff HEAD~8 --stat | fpp8. htop : a visually appealing and more convenient process monitor that replaces the traditional top command.
9. glances : a powerful alternative to htop / top that provides richer system information and also offers a web interface for remote monitoring.
10. axel : a multi‑threaded download accelerator that can replace curl or wget for faster file retrieval.
axel -n 20 http://centos.ustc.edu.cn/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso11. sz/rz : interactive file transfer utilities that simplify moving files across multiple jump hosts without manual step‑by‑step copying.
12. cloc : a code‑line counter that reports blank lines, comment lines, and language breakdowns for a codebase.
13. tmux : a terminal multiplexer that replaces screen and nohup for managing multiple sessions.
14. script / scriptreplay : tools for recording and replaying terminal sessions.
# Record
script -t 2>time.txt session.typescript
# your commands
# End recording
exit
# Replay
scriptreplay -t time.txt session.typescript15. multitail : a utility that lets you monitor multiple log files simultaneously within a single terminal window.
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