The Most Powerful Linux Utility

      by Wyatt Walter

So, recently I’ve come across what I consider one of the greatest strengths of Linux so far. Forget about flexibility, reliability, and power. Forget about security, speed, and openness. Sure, Linux has all of those things, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’ve been using Linux for years now and feel as though both the educational system and the communities surrounding Linux have failed me for not showing me the light earlier. My years learning shell scripting seem like a waste after learning this powerful tool.

Sure, everyone who knows anything about any Linux or UNIX-based OS’s knows how to use ‘ls’. ‘ls’ does have one major flaw, however, it’s not nearly as awesome as its fat-fingered friend ‘sl’. It all started yesterday when a coworker and I were working on configuring a new server. My coworker was having a bad typing day and consequently kept typing ‘sl’ instead of ‘ls’ in the command prompt. Since the machine we happened to be working on was Ubuntu server, it kept telling us that sl was not installed and we could install it by running a simple ‘apt-get install sl’. We kept going without thinking and eventually (somewhere around the 50th time) got curious as to what this sl application was and what it could bring to our lives. The moments that followed that simple apt-get command changed my view of Linux forever.

With sl installed, we began to dig in. According to the sl man page, sl is “aimed to correct users who accidentally enter sl instead of ls.” sl seems to be based upon some sort of new artificial intelligence that somehow knows that you really meant to type ls. It has all the popular ls options built-in such as -l and -a. What results is an extremely powerful, robust application that reminds you to not fat-finger commands. So, without any further adu, here’s a short video of what sl can do:

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (1) : Aug 18th, 2008

  • http://whatan00b.com/watch-movies-from-the-command-line Watch Movies from the Command Line | What a n00b!

    [...] line. The trick uses mplayer to play the movie using colored text. It’s almost as cool as the ’sl’ command which is clearly just as powerful and useful From Ubuntu, you just do:sudo apt-get install mplayer [...]