UNIX

【1:19】 Useful Unix Utilities

1 Name: Nameless : 2026/01/14 21:27

What are some useful Unix utilities you've been using lately?

Something that's entered my toolbox in the last few months is `just`.
https://github.com/casey/just

They're kind of like Makefiles but simpler, because it's not trying to be a build utility. It just runs commands. After a few months of use, I have justfiles sprinkled all through my system to run various project-specific shell commands. It hits a sweet spot between one liners and dedicated scripts, and it has really enhanced various workflows for me. Things that I wouldn't have automated before (because it feels too small), I *do* automate now, because these justfiles feel like an appropriate place for those little tasks.

10 Name: Nameless : 2026/01/19 05:20

I use ghq almost exclusively for cloning git repos.
https://github.com/x-motemen/ghq

I also use it to quickly change to the directory of a git repo with this zsh function.
https://miyagawa.co/blog/ghq-peco-percol

# peco for git repo navigation via CTRL+]
function peco-src () {
local selected_dir=$(ghq list --full-path | peco --query "$LBUFFER")
if [ -n "$selected_dir" ]; then
BUFFER="cd ${selected_dir}"
zle accept-line
fi
zle clear-screen
}
zle -N peco-src
bindkey '^]' peco-src

11 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/22 22:40

I've been using watch a lot lately.
All it does is run a command repeatedly, but it's nice for basic monitoring of sensors or a remote control program (eg, what song is playing).
example: watch -n 2 audtool current-song
will show me the current song being played in audacious right now, updating every 2 seconds

Also, one thing I do pretty regularly is less `which script`, where you'd replace script with the name of some script you wrote and I forgot what it's for/what arguments yo slapped together. ` is the backtick, and even if you should be using $(which script) instead, ` is easier to type lol.

12 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/23 07:41

>>6
I don't like detox. This is my filename canonicalization script:
sed 's/([0-9])''''/\1_inches/g
s/\#([0-9])/number_\1/g
s/\\[0-9][0-9][0-9]//g
s/%/_percent_/g
s/\+/_plus_/g
s/=/_equals_/g
s/\&/_and_/g
s/@/_at_/g' |
tr A-Z'\-([~)];.,' a-z_________ | tr -d '`''!?$' | tr -s ' ' _ |
sed 's/^_//
s/_$//'

13 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/24 16:09

>>11
I totally forgot about watch. I haven't needed it lately, but I like it too. As for which, I use it often in exactly the way you described. It's very useful.

14 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/17 00:49

I just found out about a neat trick.

diff <(lsusb) <(sleep 3; lsusb)

Run this command, plug in a USB device within 3 seconds, and you will get the information from the newly plugged in USB device. This would have been useful for me a lot of times in the past... ( ´ω｀)

15 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/17 23:53

>>14
That's really clever.

16 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/18 17:19

>>14
You could also use

paste -d '\n' <(lsusb) <(sleep 3; lsusb) | uniq -u

which i think is semantically more fitting.

17 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/20 23:46

I habitually use the trash-cli tools because I hate dealing with footguns.
no more "oh I fucked everything up" with rm -rf /some/important/dir

instead, if I do trash-put /some/important/dir
and realize, oh shit, that was wrong
I can just trash-restore it

18 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/04 19:14

If you wrangle a lot of JSON, duckdb is an amazing powertool. I used to love jq for this purpose, but duckdb obsoleted it for me. Being able to treat JSON files as tables and writing SQL queries against them has been a game changer for me. It's so much faster to both write the queries and execute them in duckdb compared to piping and filtering with jq.
https://duckdb.org/
(It can read a lot of different formats including its own database format, but I'm mostly using it with JSON.)

I also use it together with ob-duckdb in Emacs which makes it even more amazing.
https://github.com/gggion/ob-duckdb/

Highly recommended.

19 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/19 05:21

Please remember that GNU Parallel exists. GNU Parallel has completely replaced quite a few other solutions I have used over the ages. GNU Parallel is wonderful.
There are a lot of times when I will do a for loop on a bunch of files but like, I shouldn't even bother with that.

converting a bunch of video files?
$ ls *.mkv | parallel my-conversion-script.sh
(where my-conversion-script usually has some fucking ffmpeg command I do really often)

everything is done at maximum fucking speed

downloading a bunch of files?
$ parallel -j 4 wget < list-of-URLs.txt
replace 4 with however many files you want to download at once

{} is the default filename placeholder, so if you need to put it somewhere specific in your command, use that
eg,
$ parallel some-script.sh {} -o {}-converted.ext < files-to-process.txt

and there are nice features like getting the filename without the extension:
$ parallel some-script.sh {} -o {.}.ext < files-to-process.txt

【2:21】 To install, or not to install

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/15 15:49

ima linux user and ive been recently thinking about instaling unix on a vm to try it
how does it compare to gnu/linux?
i know linux was based on how unix works so i expect some similarities but i also know that its propably another thing to learn from scratch
any advice?

ive bean thinking...
████████ / _______________________
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██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒▒▒██ \/
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12 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/16 01:46

I've never been particularly convinced by Linux, but recently I've become really interested in Unix (and more specifically BSDs)
I'd love to give it a try so this thread comes at just the right time!

13 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/16 05:41

install solaris and experience why mankind doesn't do solaris anymore (it is not entirely because oracle is a bunch of cunts who pissed on sun's legacy, although that sure didn't help one bit and tanked the remaining marketshare)
sun was a great company (by large company standards at least) but I am fairly regularly reminded of how much they did wrong on a technological level, even if they were also regularly breaking new ground and generally trying to deliver value to users

THE NETWORK IS THE COMPUTER

14 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/16 07:02

>>11
>>13
i`ll try both
>>12
good that it finds use for someone else

15 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 13:04

>>12
Take a look at OpenBSD. stellar documentation on manual pages and the website FAQ, and it also has a list of recommended books on the website (openbsd.org/books.html). The creator (Theo) was a Sun Micro. fanboy and started out as a dev in the NetBSD SPARC tree. I think BSD in general gets closest to UNIX in the FOSS world.
>>13
true, unfortunately they had to die like everyone else to make space for Intel.

16 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 15:25

>>15
OpenBSD is not anything that should be used as a desktop, I'd say. It exists pretty much just for servers so they can have maximum protection.

17 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 16:14

>>16
>OpenBSD is not anything that should be used as a desktop, I'd say.
You would say wrong

18 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 17:34

>>17
There's no reason to have it unless you are overly cautious about getting randomly hacked, it's pretty overkill in that sense. You would be better off running a openbsd router and then running freebsd as a desktop for usability with the same security benefits.

19 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 17:56

>>18
>There's no reason to have it unless you are overly cautious about getting randomly hacked, it's pretty overkill in that sense.
This is a common misconception. Most people use it for the sane code practices, the manuals and the ease of use, which are things that just happen to be in common with good security. Sun also made the most secure machines on the market at the time because they thought it was a requisite, but the clients weren't looking exclusively for that.
He asked for a good unix system and i recommended one with good documentation and no ambiguity which is essential to someone that wants to learn about how things actually work.
>Running freebsd as a desktop for usability with the same security benefits.
Are you serious? Did they stop making OS and software vulnerabilities? Now they only target routers? I didn't know that.

20 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/17 19:29

>Now they only target routers? I didn't know that.
It's harder for anything to get hacked on a network since everything has to go through the router. In any way, I still recommend freebsd but it's whatever.

21 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/18 05:43

>19
>It's harder for anything to get hacked on a network since everything has to go through the router.
>>Are you serious? Did they stop making OS and software vulnerabilities?

【3:26】 Text Editors

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/01/21 09:08

What text editor do you use and why?

17 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/19 21:16

Featherpad for simple things, neovim for everything else.

18 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/18 01:21

I'm testing to see if I can post from Emacs using `M-x eww`.

19 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/20 03:32

Neovim. Nothing better than it.

20 Name: j : 2026/04/24 04:39

sam or acme, or ms-notepad when i must

21 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/28 01:36

sakura when dealing with Japanese scripts

22 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/07 08:07

Vis. Best of both worlds (vim and sam).

23 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/09 09:45

>>22
obscure but cool.
i watched a few demo videos, and editing with the structural commands was impressive.
it's also similar enough to vi that and experienced vi/vim user could use it in a basic way.
https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/vis/

24 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/12 01:10

Notepad.

25 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/12 17:31

>>24
You too have to punish your soul like >>2?

26 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/16 16:02

micro

【4:13】 Resolution

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/04 23:52

What is your current screen resolution?
Mine is 1024x768, I've used larger displays in past but I've noticed that most of that space is usually empty and I prefer information density. 1024x768 was also the standard when most of the software I use was made, so things tend to fit neatly.

4 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/05 21:16

1024x768, fast and has all the definition I care to look at.

5 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/06 05:48

1920x1080 @ 60.033 Hz
3840x2160 @ 30.000 Hz (16:9)

6 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/06 19:38

1920x1200 LED 120hz (my laptop screen)
1920x1080 TN 60hz (my 2nd screen)
1024x768 CRT 85hz (for my xp machine)

I'd really like to use my CRT monitor as my main screen, but my VGA-to-HDMI adapter has AIDS

7 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/08 10:07

>>5
30hz? how can you possibly use that as a sane human?

8 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/08 15:30

I really don't get 4k30 at all, unless it is strictly only watching videos and pretty much never gets used for the desktop or games or anything else.

9 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/08 22:09

30hz is the lowest you'd need, and honestly it would be quite comfortable, but I think 60-100~hz is about perfect.

10 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/08 23:55

ideally, I would have some kind of crazy 600hz screen, but I play rhythm games and thus actually do need the extra framerate so notes don't just jump down the screen in big, hard to read steps when I increase my scroll speed

11 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/12 12:54

when my trinitron was still working i used 1280x960@90Hz, then the green gun gave up the ghost, and now i'm stuck with a 1024x768 LCD and i absolutely hate it, because i don't know how to fix the trinitron. 16:9 just feels wrong to me now.

12 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/12 17:24

>>11
16:9 is cool for watching stuff and work but 4:3 is perfect for everything else
The web alone has never looked good on a 16:9 screen
To the point where modern websites are either zoomed in (which looks terrible) or have borders.
For games, it depends. I'd say only FPS are worth playing on a 16:9 screen (except maybe the older ones like Doom ).

13 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/13 16:53

>>12
I miss my 1280x1024 screen because web browsing really does suck at 1920x1080.

【5:5】 late.sh

■ ▲ ▼

1 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/15 19:24

https://late.sh/ - You ssh in to participate. I'm reminded of pre-internet BBSs.
Hitting ? will show you the keybindings.

2 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/30 05:21

Neat.
https://github.com/whisperchan/cursedboard is the only other ssh board I've seen before.

3 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/01 11:22

There seems to be a trend in making ssh-based TUI applications. Here's another one I found.

ssh mlbt.sh

If you like American baseball, it's quite useful.

4 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/06 20:40

>>3
How large is the red sox following there?

5 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/09 00:12

>>4
There's nothing social about it. It's all stats, so all teams are treated equally.

【6:37】 Invasion of privacy in the name of "protection"

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/24 08:08

ITT we discuss the ongoing destruction of online liberty through government datamining efforts. Systemd, which is used by many linux distros, has already crumbled to the age verification laws (´・ω・｀).

28 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/24 02:52

>>27
The owner's house got raided, Germany is worse than I thought. The owner was extra careful about following the law and was very explicit about following EU law.

29 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/24 11:27

I hate jews so much.

30 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/24 23:35

Another service I use for anonymouse email is disroot.org.

31 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/26 13:59

Hopefully disroot can stand longer, cock.li is always on the verge of getting taken down. Protonmail just looks like it's spyware, but I don't actually know the specs of how it is. Does anyone else know?

32 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/27 05:26

I would be slightly fucked if cock.li went down.

33 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/27 05:53

>>31
Protonmail will cooperate with the authorities when pressed, but if one of your emails can be traced to a crime, you've likely fucked up somewhere along the way and just getting banned will be the best case for any email. I don't get any invites to more private services, so i make single-purpose protonmail accounts with the knowledge, that anything i do with them might be used to build a profile.

34 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/27 17:14

>>32
same ( ´,_ゝ｀)

35 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/27 20:08

>>32
pissmail was the only email service I used so I already am.. ( ´,_ゝ｀)

36 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/28 01:35

>>33
But really are there any that haven't? Even cock.li has cooperated a few times, although I still consider proton worse in this regard. I don't know how disroot deals with it.

37 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/04 01:11

Cars are also being attacked with new features that build profiles on their drivers. I don't know if any laws are making this mandated yet however.

【7:10】 Scripting for Fun

■ ▲ ▼

1 Name: Nameless : 2026/01/21 10:03

Using Elisp, calculate how many days it's been since world2ch.net went offline.

(defvar world2ch-offline-date "2026-01-18"
"Date that world2ch.net went offline.")

(defun today ()
"Return today's date as an ISO-8601 date string."
(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d"))

(defun days-offline ()
"Print and return the number of days since world2ch.net went offline."
(interactive)
(let* ((math (format "<%s> - <%s> + 1"
(today)
world2ch-offline-date))
(answer (calc-eval math)))
(message answer)
answer))

(days-offline)

2 Name: Nameless : 2026/01/22 03:48

Using Elisp, determine the Chinese Zodiac sign for a given year.

(defvar cz-animals
'(rat
ox
tiger
rabbit
dragon
snake
horse
goat
monkey
rooster
dog
pig)
"These are the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac.")

(defun cz-animal (year)
"Return Chinese Zodiac animal for YEAR."
(let* ((offset (mod (- year 4) 12)))

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3 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/04 17:03

>>1
No programmer.So my question may sound really stupid.
But where in the script is the full url inlucing https and etc. so Emacs know how and where to connect?

4 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/04 19:47

>>3
There's no need to make any network requests.
It's just doing date math using the calc-eval function.
If you ran it today, it would do this.

(calc-eval "<2026-02-04> - <2026-01-18> + 1")

5 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/06 04:03

Using bash, fill the screen with rainbow-colored blocks.
This uses tput to do the lifting instead of manually blasting control codes out.
You've seen the elegance of elisp, now get ready for the ugliness of bash.

#!/bin/bash
#usage: rainbow.sh [fillrate]
#fillrate defaults to 2 (higher is faster)
#tries to be resize-aware but isn't great at it lol
#the resize can happen at exactly the wrong time, filling the whole screen with one color

check_key() {
read -t 0.03125 -N 1 -r -s
}

all_done() {
tput setab 0
tput clear
exit 0
}

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6 Name: Nameless : 2026/02/06 22:09

also yes, >>5 will absolutely spawn a ton of extremely short-lived processes nonstop lol
it is deeeeeeply inefficient and maybe I should rewrite it to blast out control codes manually

7 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/21 00:16

// Eternal Winter has returned, so I decided to back up its data in case it disappears again.
// Paste the following into your browser's dev conosole.

rows = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('div.about + hr + table tr')).map((tr) => {
tds = tr.querySelectorAll('td');
if (tds.length) {
return {
name: tds[0].innerText,
url: tds[0].querySelector('a').href,
summary: tds[1].innerText,
category: tds[2].innerText,
added: tds[3].innerText
}
} else {
return {}
}
})
rows.shift()
copy(JSON.stringify(rows, ' ', 2))

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8 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/21 00:16

>>7
https://eternalwinter.xmpub.org/

9 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/15 19:39

>>8
The site is down again. Some data was backed up at:
https://files.catbox.moe/s5nxsh.json

10 Name: Nameless : 2026/05/02 13:50

Here is yet another backup of Eternal Winter, this time in Common Lisp:
https://codeberg.org/ggxx/permafrost

【8:47】 Operating Systems

■ ▲ ▼

1 Name: Nameless : 2025/06/11 22:32

So, what OS do you use? Do not reply if you use Windows, unless it's pre-xp.
I use slackware linux, and have tampered with NetBSD. I hate BSDs with a passion

38 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/30 04:13

Why would you use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E for that when the home and end buttons are right there and do the same exact thing?

39 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/03 07:15

>>7
I agree. The Raspi peaked with the 3b+, because it still was intended as a little SBC for personal projects like electronics tinkering, servers of various kinds, and wasn't intended to be a desktop replacement. The moment they attempted to make them desktop replacements, they started to suck.

40 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/03 14:53

>>39
The current Pi price bumps are so bad that I cannot condone anyone getting a mainline Pi for anything. The worst offender is the 16GB Pi 5, which is bloody $300 now (what), bare board.
I also still maintain the value of the Pi Pico line. Most low level GPIO heavy things can be accomplished better on the Pico (and with no big-ass OS in the way, it should be much lower latency).

41 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/09 04:23

Arch, but highly considering making the switch to Artix after this systemd fuckery. I've had very few positive experiences with systemd even before the age verification.

42 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/09 12:48

Wonder if anyone is willing to make the switch to solaris

43 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/09 13:17

I've used Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora the most. Currently running Fedora on my home server and Ubuntu on my (dying) laptop.
For my next machine I was thinking about trying something different, probably Slackware or Guix.

as for my DE I spent the longest time on FVWM and now KDE

>>42
I'd rather avoid oracle if I can. I doubt they need me anyway

44 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/09 19:44

Sadly, I would imagine oracle is taking the side of the datamining laws.

45 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/09 20:04

>>43
>>44
Open Solaris aka illumos is still around.
>>30

46 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/13 17:48

as much as Sun was a good company (as far as corporations go) before they got bought out, it is good that we have left Solaris behind

maybe not entirely good (Solaris binary compatibility certainly is a lot nicer than Linux's, regardless of the Linux kernel's don't break userspace ideal)
but for all of the good design choices Sun made, they made a lot of bad ones, choices that Linux avoided

47 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/14 05:14

>>46
Solaris did a lot of things right, that Linux still struggles to replicate.

Mdb and dtrace remain unmatched as of 2026. eBPF development means it's likely dtrace may be implemented on top some time in the future, yet gdb, lldb and whatnot will likely stay subpar, let alone every distro i know stripping binaries by default.

ZFS integration into the kernel means read caching ("ARC") is more efficient and responsive. The entire boot environment/ZFS stack is a treat, compared to fstab and the occasional Linux bootloader woes.

I'm partial towards static device management, but the /devices - /dev split is certainly a lot nicer than what ended up as udev. All hardware devices in /dev are symlinks to /devices (a kernel "devfs"), which also contains things you might find in /sys on Linux. In addition to pci-utils it also has its own tools, that uniformly handle hotplugging and such for any device type.

I would also rank SMF above systemd, if i was pressed, since it centralizes configuration and editing XML with the provided tools is tolerable. The fact it's a coherently designed system makes administration more intuitive in general, despite some of the iffy parts.

【9:5】 A New Language Called Strada

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/30 18:49

https://strada-lang.github.io/
It's like Perl 5 with types.

2 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/30 20:03

Time to make the first strada textboard software!

3 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/07 07:46

>compiles to native executables via C.
Wow, how lazy. I remember when making a programming language meant writing your own compiler.

4 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/10 08:46

What a ugly website.

5 Name: Nameless : 2026/04/10 18:02

>>4 yeah the site is horrible
yuck

【10:6】 Secure Networking Retrofit

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1 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/28 23:17

This probably exists already, but I am considering making software that lets you connect a classic OS such as Windows 95 or very early Linux with modern HTTPS or SSH by acting as a translation layer to convert the connection to HTTP or insecure Telnet.

I'm probably going to write this using Java 1.0.2, which allows for you to use it on the mass majority of 32-bit operating systems. Is there any reason not to do this beyond "the usecases are very limited?"

2 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/29 01:37

I'm sure it does exist as there are efforts to modernize old OSes, and this would be one of the things those efforts would have already tried to accomplish.
If not though, I'd say it's worth a shot.

3 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/29 17:26

are you trying to do what WebOne does?
https://github.com/atauenis/webone

4 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/29 23:16

Eh, that's like half of what I want to do. I also want to support SSH and raw TLS telnet sockets.

5 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/30 02:39

>>4
honestly, then go for it in that case

6 Name: Nameless : 2026/03/30 04:14

Alright, sounds like I'm gonna work on that. I'll let you know if anything comes of it. I'll also open source the implementations.

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