5 modern alternatives to essential Linux command-line tools

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5 modern alternatives to essential Linux command-line tools

I just came across that article and I thought I should share, in case someone is interested.

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I find fd and tldr quite smart. Have to remember those.

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ncdu is awesome. htop is already pretty ubiquitous.

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There were also some good suggestions in the comments.

Pudge

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Have to try tldr - already make quite a lot of use of jq. htop is everywhere - but I rarely need the others (no server here!). Still - always interesting to see what’s out there…

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Yes and I notice that Yay is holding 1GB in cache…hmm, time for deletion.

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Not to take this too off-topic, but my pikaur cache is ginormous (it’s a yay alternative). Just how do you reduce the yay cache (and I hope I can figure out a similar way to reduce the pikaur cache). I have no problem reducing the pacman cache using paccache, but find myself having to manually delete stuff in the pikaur and yay caches. Sure could use a pointout to a tutorial on this. The pikaur man discusses it, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.

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Never mind, I figured it out with a little more digging into the git forums for pikaur:

To retain 3 copies of installed packages:
sudo /usr/bin/paccache --cachedir ~/.cache/pikaur/pkg -vrk3

To retain 1 copy of uninstalled packages:
sudo /usr/bin/paccache --cachedir ~/.cache/pikaur/pkg -vruk1

It seems obvious why one would retain packages in cache for installed packages - it facilitates easy use of downgrade should an upgrade break something. However, I have always wondered why people want to retain AUR packages they have deleted. It seems like it would be better to rebuild than install an old stale package. Do any of the wizened ninjas here have any good use case for retaining copies of uninstalled AUR packages?

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  • Sometimes you only uninstall things temporarily
  • Some AUR packages take enormous amounts of time to build so having a recent binary available can be convenient
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For example, I actively use the htop command.

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Thanks. I have fast internet and am working on a pretty high powered machine, so rebuilding from source doesn’t bother me much, but I can see why it is a good use case for some situations. As is the temporary delete and restore.