Unix: Misc tools

Various useful command line tools you may not know about

There are a lot of useful tools that you can use at the Unix command line.

Many of these will also work on Mac with Homebrew or Windows with (windows_cygwin).

Not all of these are installed on every system. So, as they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Here’s a list, then detailed descriptions for some of them.

List of tools

• find, grep, sed, awk presentation
• pandoc: convert between various document formats (Markdown, MediaWiki, LaTeX, HTML, etc.)
• convert: the command line tool for Image-Magick. Resize or convert between image formats (.png, .jpg, .gif, etc.). Produce thumbnails, or resize a huge library of images to all the same width or height with a simple shell script.
• wkhtmltopdf: convert HTML to PDF at the command line. Runs headless with no browser, and no GUI needed.