moreutils 0.7 review
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moreutils project is a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago.
It includs utilities to get network interface information, to mark standard input with time stamps, to check whether a data stream is UTF-8, to combine the lines in two files using boolean operations, to soak up standard input and write to a file, to edit a directory in your text editor, to insert a text editor into a pipe, and to tee standard input to pipes.
Probably the most general purpose tool in moreutils so far is sponge(1), which lets you do things like this:
% sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd
There are lots more listed in the README, and I'm always interested to add more to the collection, as long as they're suitably general-purpose.
Tools under consideration
Here are some that are under consideration but have not yet been included, I also welcome feedback on which of these to include.
mime
determines the mime type of a file using the gnome mine database
(More useful than file(1) in many cases but would add a lot of gnome libraries to the package's dependency chain.)
z
makes another program understand compressed files
ex: z zxgv file.bmp.gz
(Dare I take the "z" name?)
tmp
puts stdin into a temp file and passes it to the specified program
ex: zcat file.bmp.gz | tmp zxgv
add
adds up numbers from stdin
todist
inputs a list of numbers and outputs their distribution, a value and how many time it occurs in the input http://baruch.ev-en.org/files/todist
(Not a general enough unix tool, probably?)
tostats
inputs a list of numbers and outputs some statistics about the numbers: average, stddev, min, max, mid point http://baruch.ev-en.org/files/tostats
moreutils 0.7 keywords