8 unusual Linux commands

This post examines eight somewhat unusual Linux commands that are worth knowing. But before we get into the specific commands, you can run the command below to see whether these eight commands are installed on your system. For each command, you’ll see the file system location for the command executable or a line that starts with “no command in (PATH)” where “PATH” will be a display of your search path – the places where the command looks for them.

[shs@fedora ~]$  for cmd in yes shuf column pv tldr stat namei rev
do 
  which $cmd
done

The output should look like this if all the commands are installed:

usr/bin/yes
/usr/bin/shuf
/usr/bin/column
/usr/bin/pv
/usr/bin/tldr
/usr/bin/stat
/usr/bin/namei
/usr/bin/rev

Now let’s take a look at what each of these commands can do for you.

1. The yes command

The yes command will repeat the word “yes” or whatever string you provide over and over again (e.g., with a command like “yes Hello World”) until you’ve seen enough and use ^c to stop the output. Be forewarned that the output will fill your screen incredibly fast. The more useful aspect of this command is that you can use it to answer “yes” to a script that asks a lot of questions. Just run a command like this and you won’t have to type “yes” to whatever questions it will ask:

$ yes | scriptname

2. The shuf command

The shuf command will randomly shuffle the lines in a file as shown in the examples below.

$ shuf staff    $ shuf staff
Sam Adams       Sally Rose
Elaine Henry    John Doe
Joanne Zahn     Mary Berry
Mary Berry      David Bloom
Lisa Stone      Joanne Zahn
John Doe        Sam Adams
Ben Matson      Eric Docker
Eric Docker     Lisa Stone
David Bloom     Elaine Henry
Sally Rose      Ben Matson

Shuffled output can be useful when you need random text for some task or to test a script to make sure that its output is what you expect to see.

3. The column command

The column command will display text in columns. Here are two examples of how to use it:

$ cat staff | column
John Doe        Lisa Stone      Joanne Zahn     Eric Docker     Ben Matson
Mary Berry      Elaine Henry    David Bloom     Sam Adams       Sally Rose
$ cat staff | column -t
John    Doe
Mary    Berry
Lisa    Stone
Elaine  Henry
Joanne  Zahn
David   Bloom
Eric    Docker
Sam     Adams
Ben     Matson
Sally   Rose

4. The pv command

The pv (pipe viewer) command provides a useful way to display the progress of data being sent through a pipe. Here’s an example. Note the output displays the progress and the speed of the command.

$ pv largefile.zip | tar xzf -
348KiB 0:00:00 [37.4MiB/s] [============>                   ]  18%

5. The tldr command

The tldr command provides a simplified man page that displays a series of examples on how to use the command you’re asking about.

]$ tldr date

  date

  Set or display the system date.
  More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/date-invocation.html.

  - Display the current date using the default locale's format:
    date +%c

  - Display the current date in UTC, using the ISO 8601 format:
    date --utc +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z

  - Display the current date as a Unix timestamp (seconds since the Unix epoch):
    date +%s

  - Convert a date specified as a Unix timestamp to the default format:
    date --date @1473305798

  - Convert a given date to the Unix timestamp format:
    date --date "2018-09-01 00:00" +%s --utc

  - Display the current date using the RFC-3339 format (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss TZ):
    date --rfc-3339 s

  - Set the current date using the format MMDDhhmmYYYY.ss (YYYY and .ss are optional):
    date 093023592021.59

  - Display the current ISO week number:
    date +%V

6. The stat command

The stat command provides considerably more details on a file than the long file listings provided by the “ls -l” command. These include the dates and times of the latest updates and accesses.

$ stat staff
  File: staff
  Size: 112             Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 0,51    Inode: 4975        Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1001/     shs)   Gid: ( 1001/     shs)
Context: unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0
Access: 2025-04-09 13:19:11.313070260 -0400
Modify: 2025-04-09 13:19:06.317039688 -0400
Change: 2025-04-09 13:19:06.317039688 -0400
 Birth: 2025-04-09 13:19:06.317039688 -0400

7. The namei command

The namei command breaks a pathname into directory levels – showing each directory on a separate line.

$ namei -lx /usr/bin
f: /usr/bin
Dr-xr-xr-x root root /
drwxr-xr-x root root usr
dr-xr-xr-x root root bin

$ namei `pwd`
f: /home/shs
 d /
 d home
 d shs

8. The rev command

The rev command reverses lines whether passed to the command as standard in or stored in a file.

$ echo Hello, World! | rev
!dlroW ,olleH
$ echo Hello, World! | rev | rev
Hello, World!

Every 10.0s: date                                                                       fedora: Wed Apr  9 14:00:42 2025

Wed Apr  9 02:00:42 PM EDT 2025

Wrap-up

Working on the Linux command line can be both profitable and fun, and there’s always something new to learn.