/awesome-command-line-apps

:shell: Use your terminal shell to do awesome things.

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A curated list of useful command line apps, in celebration of the TUI.

“Knowledge brings fear” (Mars University Mission Statement)

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Contents

*nix/*nux

Automation

  • Ansible - Automate deployment, configuration, and upgrading.
  • fswatch - Cross-platform file change monitor with multiple backends.

Backup

  • Amanda - Open Source Network Backup for Linux, Windows, UNIX and OS X.
  • Attic - Deduplicating backup program written in Python.
  • Bacula - Manage backups, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.
  • BorgBackup - Significantly improved fork of Attic.
  • duply - Easily create GPG encrypted, compressed backups of any data almost anywhere.
  • mysqldump-secure - Secure mysqldump script with encryption, compression, logging, blacklisting and Nagios monitoring integration.

Benchmarking

  • loadtest - Runs a load test on the selected HTTP URL.
  • pv - Terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.
  • siege - http load testing and benchmarking utility.

Cloud Services

  • awscli - Official Amazon AWS command-line interface.
  • cadaver - Command-line WebDAV client for Unix.

Compression

  • archivemount - FUSE filesystem using libarchive to mount archives.
  • dtrx - Takes all the hassle out of extracting archives.

Content Creation

  • GitBook - Library and cmd utility to generate GitBooks.

Conversion

  • Echo - Convert HTML tables to JSON/CSVs.
  • Pandoc - A universal document converter.
  • binchunker - Converts a CD image in a ".bin / .cue" format (sometimes ".raw / .cue") to a set of .iso and .cdr tracks.

Databases

  • mycli - Command line interface for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
  • pgcli - Command line interface for Postgres with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

Data Processing

  • jq - Lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.

Developer

  • Cookiecutter - Command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates).
  • Critical - Extract & Inline Critical-path CSS in HTML pages.
  • Grunt - The JavaScript Task Runner.
  • HTTPie - User-friendly cURL replacement featuring intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc.
  • Publoy - Command line tool to deploy your static webapps via Dropbox.
  • The Silver Searcher - A blazingly fast tool for searching code.
  • Yarn - Deterministic, secure alternative to npm.
  • bat - Go implement CLI, cURL-like tool for humans.
  • bcal - Byte CALculator for storage conversions and calculations.
  • caniuse-cmd - All the power of caniuse.com with none of the GUI.
  • clog - A conventional changelog for the rest of us.
  • gulp - Automate and enhance your build workflow.
  • how2 - stackoverflow from the terminal.
  • http-prompt - Interactive command-line HTTP client featuring autocomplete and syntax highlighting, built on HTTPie and prompt_toolkit.
  • penthouse - Critical Path CSS Generator.
  • saws - Supercharged AWS Command Line Interface.
  • sift - Fast and powerful open source alternative to grep.

Dotfile Management

  • dotdrop - Save your dotfiles once, deploy them everywhere.
  • homeshick - Git dotfiles synchronizer written in bash.

Download Utilities

  • aria2 - Lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility.
  • peerflix - Streaming torrent client for node.js.

Email

  • Alpine - Fast, easy to use email client that is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding of power users.
  • Mutt - All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.
  • Notmuch - Fast, global-search and tag-based email system.
  • OfflineIMAP - Two-way sync your e-mail mailboxes as a local Maildir.
  • Sup - A curses threads-with-tags style email client.
  • Terjira - Command line power tool for Jira.
  • abook - text-based addressbook program designed to use with mutt mail client.
  • imapsync - IMAP synchronisation, sync, copy or migration tool.
  • isync - Command line application to synchronize Maildir and IMAP4 mailboxes both ways.
  • piler - Feature rich open source email archiving solution, and a viable alternative to commercial email archiving products.

Encryption

  • EncFS - Provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space.
  • GnuPG - Complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 (also known as PGP).

Filesystem Management

  • FDUPES - Identify or delete duplicate files residing within specified directories.
  • Midnight Commander - Feature rich visual file manager.
  • Ncdu - Disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface.
  • ranger - Minimalistic visual file manager featuring curses interface with VI key bindings.
  • vifm - ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings/modes/options/commands/configuration, which also borrows some useful ideas from mutt.
  • zfsnap - Rolling ZFS snapshots the easy way.

FTP

  • CurlFtpFS - Filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.
  • LFTP - Sophisticated ftp/http client, and a file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols.
  • NcFTP - A set of free application programs implementing the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Games

  • Angband - Angband is a free, single-player dungeon exploration game.
  • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world.
  • Curse of War - Fast-paced real-time action strategy game.
  • Frotz - Interpreter for Infocom games and other Z-machine games.
  • Nethack - Single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems.
  • dopewars - Deal in drugs on the streets of New York, amassing a huge fortune and paying off the loan shark, while avoiding the ever-annoying police.
  • vitetris - Terminal-based Tetris clone, much like the early Tetris games by Nintendo.

IRC

  • BitlBee - IRC to other chat networks gateway.
  • Irssi - The client of the future.
  • WeeChat - WeeChat is a fast, light and extensible chat client.

Media

  • AtomicParsely - Lightweight command line program for reading, parsing and setting metadata into MPEG-4 files.
  • Audiogrep - Creates audio supercuts.
  • Beets - The music geek's media organizer.
  • FFmpeg - A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
  • Gifsicle - Command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations.
  • HandBrakeCLI - Tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
  • Legofy - Python program that takes a static image or gif and makes it so that it looks as if it was built out of LEGO.
  • MKVToolNix - A set of tools to create, alter and inspect Matroska files under Linux, other Unices and Windows.
  • MediaInfo - Convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files.
  • OptiPNG - PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.
  • Pngcrush - An optimizer for PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files.
  • Shellpic - Display images inline in the shell, ASCII-art is so 2013.
  • Video Transcoding Scripts - Utilities to transcode, inspect and convert videos.
  • Videogrep - Automatic supercuts with python.
  • abcde - A Better CD Encoder.
  • cmus - Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.
  • mopidy - Self hosted MPD daemon that connects to Spotify and Soundcloud.
  • moviemon - Everything about your movies within the command line.
  • mp3fs - FUSE-based transcoding filesystem from FLAC to MP3.
  • mp4v2 - Library and tools to provide functions to read, create, and modify mp4 files.
  • mpg123 - Fast console MPEG Audio Player and decoder library.
  • ncmpcpp - NCurses based MPD client.
  • subdownloader - Downloading subtitles for one or more files is just a command away.
  • ttystudio - A terminal-to-gif recorder minus the headaches.
  • youtube-dl - A small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.

Miscellaneous

  • FIGlet - Program for making large letters out of ordinary text.
  • ansiweather - Weather in your terminal, with ANSI colors and Unicode symbols.
  • license - Create LICENSEs from the command-line.
  • pockyt - composable Pocket client for the terminal.
  • wego - Weather client for the terminal.

Networking

  • Bandwidth Monitor NG - Small and simple console-based live network and disk io bandwidth monitor.
  • Blucat - netcat for Bluetooth.
  • Netcat - Networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.
  • Nethogs - Linux 'net top' tool.
  • gping - Ping, but with a graph.
  • iftop - Display bandwidth usage on an interface.
  • localtunnel - Exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing.
  • mtr - Combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
  • ngrep - grep as a network packet analyzer.
  • nmap - Network discovery and security auditing utility.
  • vnStat - Console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s).

Presentation

  • WOPR - Simple markup language for creating rich terminal reports, presentations and infographics.
  • termui - Cross-platform, easy-to-compile, and fully-customizable terminal dashboard.

Productivity

  • Remind - Sophisticated calendar and alarm program.
  • Taskwarrior - Free and Open Source Software that manages your TODO list from your command line.
  • Timetrap - Simple command line timetracker.
  • Watson - Elegant time tracking with a CLI.
  • doing - A command line tool for keeping track of what you’re doing and tracking what you’ve done.
  • idea - Lightweight CLI tool and module for keeping ideas in a safe place quick and easy.
  • ledger - Powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line.
  • pdfgrep - Command line utility to search text in PDF files.
  • pin-cushion - Simple, maintained CLI interface to the Pinboard.in API.
  • woof - Simple one-off HTTP file sharing.

RSS

  • newsbeuter - The Mutt of RSS feed readers.
  • rss2email - A free, open-source tool for Windows and UNIX for getting news from RSS feeds in email.

Security

  • Aircrack-ng - 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured.
  • Let's Encrypt - A free, automated and open Certificate Authority.

SSH

  • autossh - Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels.
  • ironssh - E2E encrypt files transferred using sftp/scp and share access with other users.
  • sshfs - Locally mount a remote folder via SSH.
  • storm - A command line tool to manage your ssh connections.

System

  • ApacheTop - Curses-based top-like display for Apache information, including requests per second, bytes per second, most popular URLs, etc.
  • dstat - Versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat.
  • htop - An interactive process viewer.
  • iotop - Find out what's stressing and increasing load on your hard disks.
  • maybe - See what a program does before deciding whether you really want it to happen.
  • netboot.xyz - Boot multiple Operating System installers or utilities over the network from a single menu.
  • screenFetch - Fetches system/theme information in terminal for desktop screenshots.

Terminal

  • Fisherman - A blazing fast, modern plugin manager for fish shell.
  • Marker - The terminal command palette.
  • MultiTail - Monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows in a terminal, colorize, filter and merge.
  • PathPicker - After parsing the output from a command, PathPicker presents you with a nice UI to select which files you're interested in.
  • SCREEN - A "window manager" for the console and terminals.
  • asciinema - Free and open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web.
  • autojump - A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line.
  • bgrep - Like grep but for binary strings.
  • byobu - Text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer.
  • ccat - Colorizing the cat command.
  • cheat - Create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line.
  • desk - Lightweight workspace manager for the shell.
  • dit - Dotfile manager that hooks into git.
  • fundle - Minimalist package manager for fish shell.
  • fzf - A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
  • pick - Fuzzy select anything.
  • tmux - A terminal multiplexer.
  • yank - Yank terminal output to clipboard.
  • z - Tracks your most used directories, based on 'frecency'.

Text Editors

  • Diakonos - A linux editor for the masses.
  • Emacs - An extensible, customizable text editor.
  • Kakoune - Modal editor with multiple selections and orthogonal design.
  • Neovim - Modern version of the Vim editor with many advanced features.
  • Vim - Advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set.
  • Vis - A highly efficient text editor.

Version Control

  • Bazaar - Easily manage source code on Windows, Ubuntu, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X.
  • Git - Git is a free and open source distributed version control system.
  • Mercurial - Free, distributed source control management tool.
  • gitfs - Version controlled file system.
  • tig - ncurses based text-mode interface for Git.

VPN

  • OpenVPN - Full-featured open source SSL VPN solution.
  • racoon - Internet Key Exchange (IKE) daemon for automatically keying IPsec connections.
  • strongSwan - Open Source IPsec for Linux.

World Wide Web

  • ELinks - Advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web (HTTP/FTP/..) browser.
  • GoAccess - Real-time visual web log analyzer and interactive viewer.
  • googler - Google Search, Google Site Search, Google News from the terminal.
  • pageres - Capture screenshots of websites in various resolutions.

BSD

  • ezjail - Jail administration framework.
  • pkgsrc - Portable package build system.
  • poudriere - Port/Package build and test system.

Linux

  • IPTraf - Console-based network statistics utility for Linux.
  • aptly - Swiss army knife for Debian repository management.
  • btrfs - Copy on write (CoW) filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
  • deborphan - Finds packages installed on your Debian/GNU system that have no other packages depending on them.

Mac OS X

  • Fink - The full world of Unix Open Source software for Darwin.
  • Homebrew - The missing package manager for OS X.
  • MacPorts - Compile, install and upgrade either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software.
  • Night Shift Shell Utility - Simple shell utility to control the macOS Night Shift feature.
  • XLD - Tool to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files.
  • itunes-remote - Control iTunes via CLI.
  • mas - Mac App Store command line interface.
  • reminders-cli - A simple CLI for interacting with Reminders.
  • tag - Manipulate tags on files and query for files with those tags.

Helpers

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License

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