Lot of people in LUG think only Linux exists. So let me focus on Linux. Though this mail applies to all those UNIX flavors out there.
Usually everybody needs an editor. And most people hate Linux because of vi or vim. But that is the most brilliant creation and is extremely productive if you learn it and start to love it. There are people who love emacs as well. There are other alternatives these days like nano which I never use. grep is a very useful tool to sift through text lines to pick out lines of interest. It is so commonly used that it has almost become an English word. There are some mail clients, most people prefer graphical ones like thunderbird. But I use a software called mutt. It is extremely powerful and integrates very well with an editor like vim. Along with syntax highlighting and include_headers switch it is very powerful. Then a tool I love a lot is netcat, used for TCP,UDP and UNIX sockets server and client testing. If you have a lot of files that come from Windows world with spaces and funny characters you can use mmv for moving files en masse and renaming them to adhere to UNIX conventions. Then you have the youtube-dl python script to download youtube videos for offline watching. mplayer for playback of multimedia, audio and video files. scp,ssh and ftp like pure-ftpd server for anonymous file serving, lftp client and so on. rsync is also useful for transfer of files between locations that require suspend resume over bad connections and for large files. Over a period of time you settle at certain tools that can improve your working in a significant way. A programmer will use make and revision control like darcs, git or cvs. I also use the at command for tasks that I want the computer to do without my help. But that is rare and only for downloads or uploads. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
