Tools

Finding, moving, packing and unpacking files.

ls See what a folder holds, with sizes and permissions GNU Project 6 find Locate files by name, size, age or permissions GNU Project 6 fd A faster, friendlier take on the classic search command David Peter 6 tree Draw a directory hierarchy as an indented diagram Steve Baker 6 ranger A keyboard-driven file manager for the terminal Roman Zimbelmann 6 Midnight Commander An old-school dual-pane file manager for the terminal Miguel de Icaza 6 tar Pack many files into one archive, then unpack it GNU Project 6 unzip Extract and inspect ZIP archives from the terminal Info-ZIP 6 7-Zip Compresses hard, and reads and writes many formats Igor Pavlov 6 gzip Compress single files with the widespread deflate format GNU Project 6 rsync Synchronise directories over local or remote paths Andrew Tridgell 6 file Identify what a path really contains Ian Darwin 6

Reading, searching and reshaping text, tables and JSON.

grep Search text line by line, printing every match GNU Project 6 ripgrep A very fast recursive search that honours ignore rules Andrew Gallant 6 sed Rewrite a stream of text with find-and-replace rules GNU Project 6 GNU Awk Process and total column-based text with a small language GNU Project 6 cut Pull chosen columns or character ranges out of lines GNU Project 6 sort Order lines alphabetically, numerically, or by a key GNU Project 6 uniq Collapse or count repeated lines that sit together GNU Project 6 tr Translate or delete single characters in a stream GNU Project 6 wc Count lines, words, characters and bytes GNU Project 6 less Page through long output with search and scroll Mark Nudelman 6 bat A colourful pager with syntax highlighting and line numbers David Peter 6 jq Slice, filter and reshape JSON from the terminal Stephen Dolan 6

The shell itself, and keeping work alive between sessions.

Bash The default login shell on Termux and most Linux systems Free Software Foundation 5 Zsh Extended Bourne-style shell with smart completion and globbing Zsh Development Group 5 tmux Keep sessions alive and split one terminal into many panes Nicholas Marriott 6 GNU Screen A veteran terminal multiplexer for detaching and resuming sessions GNU Project 5 Zellij A modern terminal workspace with built-in layouts and hints Zellij contributors 5 Byobu Friendly wrappers and a status bar around a terminal multiplexer Dustin Kirkland 5 fzf Interactive fuzzy finder you can pipe anything into Junegunn Choi 5 Zoxide Jump to directories by typing part of their name Ajeet D'Souza 5 tldr Community cheat sheets that show the common uses of a command tldr-pages contributors 5

Seeing what runs, and stopping it cleanly.

ps List running processes with their resource use procps-ng project 6 top Live view of CPU and memory with the busiest processes procps-ng project 6 htop Colourful interactive process viewer with scrolling and shortcuts Hisham Muhammad and contributors 6 btop Rich resource monitor with graphs for CPU, memory and network Aristocratos 5 procs Modern replacement for ps with colour and sensible defaults dalance 6 kill Send signals to processes to stop or reload them procps-ng project 6 strace Trace the system calls a program makes strace project 6

Addresses, ports, name lookups and reachability.

Nmap Scan the hosts you own and see what answers Gordon Lyon (Fyodor) and the Nmap Project 6 tcpdump Watch the packets crossing an interface you control The Tcpdump Group 6 dig Ask any resolver for the DNS records you want Internet Systems Consortium 6 whois Look up who holds a domain or address block Marco d'Itri 5 ip Inspect and change addresses, routes and links Stephen Hemminger and the iproute2 maintainers 6 ping Check reachability and round-trip time to a host The iputils maintainers 5 traceroute Map the path packets take to a destination Dmitry Butskoy 5 mtr Continuous path and loss report in one view Roger Wolff 5 netcat Read and write raw TCP or UDP connections The OpenBSD project 5 socat Relay data between two addresses or channels Gerhard Rieger 5

Fetching, downloading and moving files between hosts.

curl Transfer data over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and more Daniel Stenberg and the project contributors 6 wget Download without prompts, and mirror a whole site The GNU Project 5 aria2 Multi-connection downloader for HTTP, FTP and torrents Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa 5 axel Small download accelerator that splits one file Wilmer van der Gaast and contributors 5 OpenSSH Encrypted remote shell and file transfer suite The OpenSSH project 6 rclone Sync files between local storage and cloud remotes Nick Craig-Wood 6 Syncthing Peer-to-peer folder sync between your own devices The Syncthing Foundation 6 lftp Scriptable file transfer over FTP and SFTP Alexander V. Lukyanov 6 yt-dlp Download video and audio from many sites The yt-dlp project 5

Keys, hashes, encryption and authorised testing.

OpenSSL Cryptography toolkit for keys, hashes and TLS The OpenSSL Project 6 GnuPG Encrypt, sign and verify files with public keys The GnuPG Project 6 age Small, modern file encryption tool Filippo Valsorda and contributors 5 pass Standard Unix credential store backed by GPG Jason A. Donenfeld 6 pwgen Generate pronounceable or fully random values Theodore Ts'o 6 hashcat Test hashes to audit how strong your secrets are Jens Steube (atom) and the hashcat project 6 John the Ripper Audit password hashes across many formats Openwall 6 hydra Test your own login services against candidates The Hacker's Choice (THC) 5 sqlmap Detect and exploit SQL injection in your own apps Bernardo Damele and Miroslav Stampar 6 nikto Web server checks for a site you control Chris Sullo and David Lodge 6 WireGuard Modern VPN tunnel with a small attack surface Jason A. Donenfeld 6

Pulling apart packets, binaries and images.

Tshark Wireshark on the command line, for reading packet captures The Wireshark Foundation 6 Binwalk Find files and file systems hidden inside firmware and blobs ReFirmLabs 5 ExifTool Read, write and strip the metadata inside media files Phil Harvey 5 Radare2 A framework for disassembling, inspecting and patching binaries The Radare2 developers 6 Strings Find the readable text hidden in any binary file The GNU Project 5 xxd Dump a file as hex, and turn a dump back into binary The Vim project 6 Apktool Unpack, inspect and rebuild Android app packages Connor Tumbleson 5

Installing and tracking software.

pkg Termux's package manager for installing software The Termux project 6 APT The package manager underneath Termux The Debian Project 6 dpkg Inspect and manipulate single Debian package files The Debian Project 6 pip Install and manage Python packages from PyPI The Python Packaging Authority 6 npm The package manager for JavaScript projects The npm project 6

Writing, compiling and running code on the phone.

Git Distributed version control for every change to your files The Git project 6 Python A readable general-purpose language with a rich library The Python Software Foundation 6 Node.js Run JavaScript away from the browser, on a server or the CLI The OpenJS Foundation 5 Go A compiled language for simple, fast and concurrent programs The Go team at Google 6 Clang A modern front end for C, C++ and Objective-C The LLVM Project 6 Make Automate builds from a description of file dependencies The GNU Project 6 ShellCheck Find bugs and pitfalls in shell scripts before you run them Vidar Holen 5

Editing files from the terminal.

Vim A modal editor that runs on any server, even a slow one The Vim project 6 Neovim A modern take on Vim, with built-in language support The Neovim project 5 nano A small, friendly editor that keeps its shortcuts on screen Chris Allegretta and the nano contributors 5 micro A terminal editor with familiar shortcuts and mouse support Zachary Yedidia 5

Converting audio, video, images and documents.

FFmpeg Convert, trim, compress and stream audio and video The FFmpeg team 6 ImageMagick Create, edit and convert images in bulk ImageMagick Studio LLC 6 Pandoc Convert documents between markup formats, structure intact John MacFarlane 6 Tesseract Read the text inside images and scanned pages The Tesseract OCR community 6 mpv A compact media player, driven from the terminal The mpv project 6 FIGlet Turn short text into large banners of ordinary characters Glenn Chappell and Ian Chai 6

Disk, memory, open files and system state.

ncdu Browse disk usage interactively and delete from the tree Yorhel (Yoran Heling) 6 duf Colourful table of mounted filesystems and free space Christian Muehlhaeuser 6 dust Show which directories are using the most space bootandy 6 free Report how much memory is used, available and cached procps-ng project 5 uptime Show how long the device has been running and the load average procps-ng project 5 lsof List the files and sockets open processes are holding lsof project 6