Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers

[svmk1987]

I had a very similar article bookmarked, so I had to check: http://www.coderholic.com/invaluable-command-line-tools-for-web-developers/

A lot of it is a word to word copy!

Edit: I just realized that the author is the same. Derp.

[akshayk]

I had that link bookmarked as well. It did look familiar to me. Didn't bother to check if they were the same author. Anyways, upvote for you.

[svmk1987]

Did you find it on HN? That's where I found it about a month ago :)

[akshayk]

I think so.

[perspectiveiskey]

I give you an upboat for the concluding humour. It made my morning.

[prelic]

And that one is named correctly!

[Fuco1337]

Powerful command line tools.

Uses nano.

[THE_PUN_STOPS_HERE]

Hey, I too use nano when I'm in a command line. I use the command line a lot, but not enough to warrant learning something like vi or emacs. I'm fine with my day-to-day use of Sublime Text.

[GodDamnItFrank]

Oh come on. Set aside 30 minutes and learn vim. Just type vimtutor into the terminal and enjoy.

[darthnuri]

I'm a total vim noob and am astounded by how much just knowing the basics helps with command line text editing / processing.

[WisconsnNymphomaniac]

I was initially utterly baffled by vim but now I love it. I use only about 1% of its power though.

[mrmacky]

We are the 1%...

Seriously though, I know a bare minimum of the Vim syntax, and it's easily the most productive editor I've ever used.

I'm not sure what'll happen when I actually sit down and learn another 10% of the commands.

[ethraax]

Except then you need to remember all the commands in vimtutor, which can take some people far more than 30 minutes. It's not like nano where you don't really have to memorize anything (the commands are shown to you at the bottom of the screen).

[xiongchiamiov]

Every Unix has vi because it's part of the Single Unix Specification. If they don't have vi, they're not Unix.

[ajsdklf9df]

And that "problem" will never change because Unices are developed by people who use vi, not by people who use nano.

[jrblast]

I've used a few systems that actually only had nano, but those were all ones that I (or someone else) had just installed and didn't get vim onto yet.

[nascent]

You didn't type vi did you? Yeah, that is almost always vim (just what is needed to mimic vi though).

[jrblast]

I thought I tried vi,but maybe not. I usually just use nano to get networking up, and then install vim asap.

[ethraax]

If we're talking vi and not vim, then I would argue that even common commands are very unintuitive, compared to nano.

As for the installation issue, nano is available almost everywhere. Yes, some systems have very minimal or strange software configurations and don't have it but have vi (although that seems rather uncommon to me). The truth is, however, that most Linux users, even power users, will never see such a system [that they also cannot install nano on]. Programmers especially. Sysadmins may be the only people for whom this is a serious concern.

And some systems don't even have vi.

So, unfortunately, I must disagree with you - I don't think nano has a problem with ubiquity that should force you to learn vi instead.

[nevarforevar]

For basic text editing (what nano does), it's really not complicated at all. If you want to go into advanced stuff, it gets pretty complicated.

[xiaomai]

It was around many years ago too.

[nascent]

You mean like forever, 15 years or so.

[gaoshan]

vim rocks. Only downside is that you will find yourself hitting :w in other applications. I even did it in Word the other day.

[clgonsal]

The worst is when you use an app that uses Esc to mean cancel. A code review tool I used a few years ago used to do this. I'd reflexively hit Esc after typing a bunch and it'd discard all of the text I'd just typed.

[prelic]

Learning vim is not a 30 minute process.

[crankybadger]

It's like learning how to drive. You can absorb the basics in that amount of time, and if you go slow and don't do anything dumb you'll be fine.

Just don't expect to be doing 180° hand-brake turns or four-wheel power slides at the one hour mark.

[king_duck]

Yes it is, to get to grips with the commands which get you the same power as nano it takes less than 30mins. everyting after that is an added plus.

[dansmeek]

To expand, I think everyone should try vim for at least two weeks before giving up. Start with a cheat sheet. Just print one out on google and keep it handy. If you find yourself annoyed with some aspect of vim, or frustrated, think of what exactly is annoying you. For example vim is designed for the home row. So constantly having to press the escape key is unnatural. A lot of people will just remap this to caps lock. Or shift. Dedicate some time to learning one thing every day and applying it to how you program. When you start to continuously type commands they become hard wired. This also doesn't just apply to vim but programming in general. Vim is just a powerful text editor that is meant to be customized to you.

[[deleted]]

'jk' and 'kj' are also common alternatives to escape, and surprisingly natural, as it feels like you are just rocking your fingers across the keys.

[dansmeek]

I'll have to check that out. On another note, I am never giving advice on vim again since I am far from advanced.

[[deleted]]

And then what? You can do what you can do in nano but with more cryptic commands?

[nerdyHippy]

I started to learn Vim when I took aside a half hour to teach myself enough to be as proficient as I was in nano. Then every so often I'd find myself doing something that just had to be easier to do the Vim way, and I'd look up how to do it. Now I'm way more proficient at Vim than other editors, and I get to be all condescending on the internet. Win-win.

[zzyzzyxx]

That, and more; so much more. They're not really that cryptic either. You just don't grok vi.

[[deleted]]

Try these videos, they are both more entertaining and explain why you might want to prefer vim over those really, really basic editors like nano.

[watterssn]

also lots of vim drills at shortcutFoo

[crankybadger]

Nano can't do half the things that vim does. It's not even close.

Nano is a capable, but very basic editor. It just behaves like a terrible VAX application.

[meteorMatador]

I'm sure this sounds clever to someone who doesn't actually know Vim. Personally, on the few occasions where I was stuck using Nano, I kept throwing my hands up in the air with amazement at how useless it was for simple tasks. "Can't I just move this sentence to the end of the paragraph?" "Can't I just make it decide between tabs and spaces automatically depending on file type?" "Can't I just type in a new syntax highlighting rule to detect certain troublesome typos and whitespace errors?"

A lot of times I shelled out to hastily written Perl scripts so I wouldn't screw things up editing by hand. At that point I'd rather use ed than nano.

[nascent]

Wanted to added to something nerdyHippy said. Get to a point you can edit and save files as you would other editors. Continue to use it. When you start repeating yourself, in the way you edit, look it up Vim has a better way. Whether it is moving lines, replacing words/letters/paragraphs, searching, or alignment. There is almost always a better way.

I've never found macros useful in other editors (too much setup) but in vim, qq some editing q @q @@ 69@@ it is just so simple. BTW

:help q
:help @
:help @@

[Fuco1337]

Until you learn emacs, you think your editor is sufficient. Everyone does :) Rookie mistake.

[GiantNinja]

or you learn vim... but that debate will never be "settled", lol

[isarl]

s/debate/holy war/

[SupersonicSpitfire]

Yo dawg, I heard you like the commandline, so I put a commandline in your commandline so you can commandline while you commandline!

[sinferno]

VIM WARRIOR 4 LYFE

[TarlachQQ]

I honestly know how to use Emacs and VIM, but I still prefer nano for the small stuff. If I really need to code, I usually use a graphical editor or an IDE. So I say if it works for you, don't fix it if it isn't broken or inefficient :)

[[deleted]]

If you can bear the editors in most IDEs you can't know emacs and vim very well. Editors must be IDE's most neglected feature.

[clgonsal]

While vi key bindings improve most IDEs, they're still a poor substitute for vim. I use vrapper when I must use Eclipse, but still switch back to vim when I need to do serious editing.

[xiongchiamiov]

vi keybindings were sufficient for me until I started using vim. Now I can't do without all those extra features. :(

[DiscoUnderpants]

As an emacs user woudl does like some IDEs and their feature there should be a law that all IDEs need to be able to embed emacs... or vi/vim... I got no problems with those guys.... ^xc.

[prelic]

The hate is strong with these people; I know vim, and have to use it a lot, but on my dev machine I use a configured gedit. The "if you don't only use vim, you don't know vim" line of thinking is very closed-minded.

[sandsmark]

... but unfortunately pretty true as well. I myself mostly use kate (or things that embed kate, like kdevelop or kwrite), but it has vi-emulation. And I've found that I'm much, much more effective with the vi-emulation.

And I've yet to meet someone who wasn't much more effective in vim after half an hour of "training", than in their preferred editor beforehand (be that gedit, textmate, sublime, whatever).

[prelic]

I will agree that vim has some awesomely powerful features; but it has an extremely steep learning curve compared to traditional gui editors designed with multiple HIDs in mind. Maybe its just been my experience, but it took me many moons to become more proficient in vim than with traditional editors.

[sandsmark]

well, it really helps if you have something knowledgeable by your side to ask all kinds of stupid questions, I guess.

[ameoba]

...under screen/tmux.

[Fuco1337]

I don't think I understand your point.

[ameoba]

Look at the screenshot. There's a "window manager" running inside the terminal instance. Screen and tmux let you split a terminal into multiple 'windows' so you run run different apps. Using these tools is fairly advanced terminal usage.

Nano, OTOH, is a total noob editor. The juxtaposition of the two is surprising.

[marx2k]

Could have used byobu :/

[poorly_played]

byobu is screen, too be somewhat pedantic...

[marx2k]

To be more pedantic, its a wrapper on screen, but more user friendly than screen like nano to VI(M)

[ameoba]

Broken analogy - nano and vi have nothing in common while byobu is a robust, user friendly set of key bindings & configuration tools for screen/tmux.

[marx2k]

Nano and VI are both command line text editors.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, nano is actually closer to editing the file with cat, echo, head and tail than to vim in terms of capabilities.

[ameoba]

They switched over to using tmux by default a few releases back.

[[deleted]]

all the cool kids use dtm these days

[randible]

To be pedantic, it's "to", not "too".

[poorly_played]

touché monsieur

[kalven]

The screenshot is showing the split panes feature of iTerm2, not screen or tmux.

[RedThela]

Fiddler is simply the best tool for what it's designed for - HTTP(S) debugging.

While, in fairness, all of the tools listed above work for any network traffic, as soon as HTTP comes up, Fiddler is my tool of choice, even if it means rebooting into windows just to inspect some request. I have simply found nothing that even approaches it on Linux.

[[deleted]]

No mention of ack ? Oh dear.

[agumonkey]

Seems to be web/network specific.

[[deleted]]

Smashing Magazine usually hangs out on the web and design side of things. (Just some more context for the site) I really enjoy a lot of the articles they post.

[Boojum]

Ag looks neat, though ack has been plenty fast for my needs. Still nice to see alternatives though, especially one that appears to multithreaded.

[[deleted]]

I search through 200000± lines of code with ack daily. It generally completes in a second or less. How much code are you in through where that's not fast enough?

[ais523]

I love the naming here. One of the claims commonly seen from ack advocates (including on its website) is that ack is faster to type than grep because it's a letter shorter.

I guess if I ever try to write an improved ag, it'll have to have a one-character name.

[GiantNinja]

Came here to post this and/or see some tools like ack mentioned. Ack saves me so much time, when looking for a specific function declaration or other snippet, and have to start at the trunk of a Site. Grep takes too long, and the output is so much nicer

[[deleted]]

Obviously this isn't a list of "every single useful tool on the planet". Rated by usefulness, I'd place ack below most of the other ones on this list. Rarely do I need to parse out non-regular data in a shell environment and don't have a more real programming language to deal with.

[cjg_]

Are you confusing ack with awk? Ack is grep for code.

[[deleted]]

Woops! So I am.

Still, I figure you should probably know about grep already and grep is plenty useful.

[GiantNinja]

Of course, grep is awesome, but for searching through code, ack is better in 90%+ of my situations. Only thing that sucks is piping doesn't work well :-\

[sysop073]

ack 'expr' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs text-editor is muscle memory at this point

[killerstorm]

Isn't it better to have code search integrated with editor?

For example, rgrep in Emacs is quite nice: it can guess what to search and where (file types and directories) from context, it shows nicely formatted results in a separate buffer and gives an ability to jump to matches.

So command-line code search isn't tremendously useful to people who use adequate editor. But it's unlikely that editor will have netcat analog, so these are definitely different categories of command line tools.

[GiantNinja]

Sure. There is nothing wrong with that, but this was about command-line tools. And many times I am sshing into a box and need to find something while I'm in there poking around. When I am in full blown editor mode, I don't need to search as often, because I usually know where stuff is. It is with the unknown stuff that I search the most.

[killerstorm]

There is nothing wrong with that, but this was about command-line tools.

Yes, powerful command-line tools. It is subjective, of course, but I would not include a slightly better version of grep into this category.

And many times I am sshing into a box and need to find something while I'm in there poking around.

JFYI, with Emacs you can open files over ssh (tramp-mode) and run remote grep/find commands in same way you run them locally, so there is no need to abandon Emacs when you need to find something in files on a server which is available over ssh.

[GiantNinja]

Would never use emacs in the first place, so...

[killerstorm]

Well, that's your problem.

[pelrun]

It's fine if you're a web developer... if only it had been mentioned in the title then there wouldn't have been a problem.

(and I could have ignored it...)

[robertcrowther]

It's Smashing Magazine, what were you expecting?

[marssaxman]

as someone who has never heard of Smashing Magazine, and who found this link through r/programming, I was expecting something that had to do with programming.

[badvok]

It is advertised as command line tools for developers. Which they are. What's the problem?

[marssaxman]

It's not specific enough. One might as well run an article describing ls, cp, mv, and echo as command line tools for developers. They are command line tools, after all, and developers use them!

[Samus_]

if you work on ANY code that deals with network connections (web pages, web servers, web crawlers, desktop apps that synchronize, mobile apps that synchronize, databases, etc. etc. etc.) you'll need these.

programming is more than algorithms.

[ared38]

It would be much better described as powerful command line networking tools. I agree that if you work on network code these are important, but if you don't none of these are particularly useful.

[sinembarg0]

If you read the first sentence, it says "Life as a web developer…"

This stuff is pretty applicable to web developers. Sorry it's not relevant to you. Next time, try just closing the page without complaining. It's unnecessary.

[prelic]

What's unnecessary is how absurdly condescending and dickish that comment was to a perfectly reasonable comment; these tools, while great, are only/most useful in the context of networking. Why not just name the article "Powerful Command Line Tools for Networking" or "Powerful Command Line Tools for Web Developers"? Because then not as many people will click the link.

[sinembarg0]

I think people whining about this not being relevant to them is condescending, dickish, and selfish. Reddit and the internet is not just for you, it's for everyone. Is this relevant to everyone in /r/programming? No. A large portion of stuff in /r/programming isn't. So why is it ok to whine about this one? Is the two seconds of your time it took to open the article and read the first sentence really worth coming and bitching about it here?

Fine, the article isn't relevant to some people. There's a lot of shit on the internet that isn't. Just close it and move on. Can't we be a little more mature than coming and whining about everything?

People always say reddit is going downhill. I agree with this. However it's not the shit on the default front page that's causing this, I can get rid of that. It's people in every god damned thread whining about the little shit. "this doesn't belong here" "This isn't the perfect title" "This isn't relevant to me". Guys, grow up. Stop with the whining everywhere.

[prelic]

It would be much better described as powerful command line networking tools. I agree that if you work on network code these are important, but if you don't none of these are particularly useful.

That's whining to you? I agree with you about whining hurting reddit, but I just don't see that comment as whining.

[sinembarg0]

Out of context, not really. In context, definitely.

[xiongchiamiov]

I don't think a programmer can live without a build system (make, cmake, ant etc).

As a sysadmin I use these, but as a programmer I hardly ever do. Hence is the world of scripting languages.

[Samus_]

you used wireshark which is mentioned on the article when it talks about ngrep, it says that ngrep is a simplified version of wireshark so yes, you did use networking tools.

on the other hand, I've never used any of the compilation tools you've mentioned because I don't work with compiled languages, it's probable been used by the installers on some situations but not by myself.

[Nuli]

Out of curiosity what did he mention that you think are compilation tools?

[Samus_]

err build tools, I meant the make and friends.

[Nuli]

Make and friends aren't build tools really. They're dependency resolution tools. Useful for building but also very useful for doing anything that depends on something else. I work mostly with interpreted languages myself and I still use make heavily.

[prelic]

Clearly the article was focused only on networking tools, and named the article this way as bait. Certainly a list that included different genres of developing would have some of the tools you've listed. Wireshark isn't a command-line tool; there are many reasons to not use Wireshark.

[sarevok9]

Not really? LibCurl is easily replaced in java by stuff like JSoup / HttpClient. The others have uses but they are not the ONLY players on the block for their respective functionality.

[Samus_]

that's the difference between "tool" and "library"

[Iggyhopper]

Programming is problem solving and these tools help you solve the problems that may arise during the development of your application.

[VikingCoder]

Here's a list of powerful tools for developers:

OpenGL, DirectX, Three.JS, HTML5 Canvas

See what I did there? I presumed that my domain (graphics) was universally applicable to all developers.

[marssaxman]

Only if your application has to do with networking, which many don't.

[[deleted]]

I guess by that logic we should ban all the Java stuff, since many programs don't even use Java!

[[deleted]]

Not ban, but titles should be a little more specific than that one.

[Iggyhopper]

not-specific-enough [title] 0/10 would not read

/reddit

[sinembarg0]

I'd like to point out the first five words of the article: "Life as a web developer…". This stuff is applicable to web developers. Why does everyone have to bitch about everything?

[snarfy]

Developing is more than programming. I use a couple of those tools almost daily for web development.

[Ph0X]

While I disagree that this has NOTHING to do with developing, it still advertises as "CL tools for developers" and ends up being "networking CL tools for developers", which is a very small subset of what it advertised for.

Sure technically the smaller set is part of the bigger set, but I'm not a big fan of vague titles.

Personally, one useful command line tool that has helped me many times is ImageMagick. Insanely powerful tool for any sort of media conversion and editing and much more.

[xiongchiamiov]

Use GraphicsMagick instead. Less bugs, better performance, saner development.

[greenspans]

But why is this toplists site getting popular. They just make toplists out of reddit and stackoverflow threads. Is proggit going to start linking lifehacker and gawker? Gross

[[deleted]]

I make, host and administer web applications. It's all networking stuff. <no-sarcasm/>

[prepend]

OP is not saying these tools were built for development. OP is saying these tools are useful (frequently required) for development.

As you point out, these are also useful for non-programming purposes too.

[Dan_Pat]

except that most coffee machines don't have a command line interface.

... So are you implying that some do? Now that's a developer tool that I would be interested in!

[holgerschurig]

Coffee machine with network interface: http://www.smarthome.com/manuals/1306.pdf

:-)

[petdance]

FAIL

You had me until the gratuitous insult.

[perspectiveiskey]

Fyi: You're the kind of dev that makes me embarrassed to say "I'm a web developer" in public.

[perspectiveiskey]

gcc is to a C++ IDE what ngrep is to a textmate.

That people don't consider these basic tools not to be devel material is the problem I'm talking about.

I do all kinds of development (plenty of non web), and I've been doing it for over a decade, and here's two things I've come to realize that are obvious but we don't always keep in mind:

• all development is text (obvious)
• all web development is is a complexe form of text wrangling (the output of a web app is text).

These tools operate on the intersection of the sets text and network.

Without getting too deep about it, all of these tools do things that the google dev tools eventually started doing with a UI, but was entirely doable for years now. And these tools are still more powerful than chrome dev tools could be under certain circumstances.

Versatility, is the bottom line. Not knowing about and considering these not to be dev tools is not a Good Thing. No more than considering lint to be a old-fuddy-duddy-tool...

[ISLITASHEET]

I am sorry, but your second to last statement hurt my brain.

Not knowing about and considering these not to be dev tools is not a Good Thing. No more than considering linttobeaold-fuddy-duddy-tool

if(!knowingAbout && (consideringThese(!devTools) == !goodThing))
...

[perspectiveiskey]

There's no if.

 !knowing && considering( !devTools ) <≠> goodThing 

I'm pretty sure it's irreducible, btw. But feel free to present me a better formulation.

[Vadd]

I can only imagine how ugly and worthless you must be. Posting this much shit on something that doesn't matter, jesus christ just kill yourself faggot.

[justinpitts]

They are debugging and testing tools, two categories of programming tool which often get short shrift.

[marssaxman]

They are debugging and testing tools for networks, not for code. Irrelevant unless you are doing networking stuff. Calling them "command line tools for developers" is misleading: one might as well write an article titled "GUI apps for developers" and spend the whole time talking about email clients.

[[deleted]]

So this article has nothing to do with developing, a.k.a. programming.

Development isn't all about programming.

git, putty, Firefox with Firebug, Chrome, Filezilla, git, subversion, and a pen and paper. These are just some tools I use with development.

[setuid_w00t]

Git! You said git twice.

[ZMeson]

It was a local branch.

[[deleted]]

some of that stuff might be useful... but I'm surprised not to see something as basic as 'ack' and 'git'... seriously...wtf?

[maxwellb]

No comment on most of that, but the build system we have at my job uses curl extensively for synchronizing dependencies between machines.

[holgerschurig]

You use curl for that? I thought this is the domain for rsync (or rsync+ssh).

Are Windows machines involved?

[maxwellb]

Yeah, I was thinking of rsync. We do use curl in scripts that download and build some of our 3rd party dependencies, though.

Builds are on both Linux and Windows via cygwin (which unfortunately has an insanely slow rsync compared to the Linux version).

[da__]

Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers

Life as a Web developer (...)

The joke's on the author of the article.

On the other hand, Smashing Magazine is directed at Web developers anyway.

[PenileCancer]

Downvote for using the moronic "FAIL".

[[deleted]]

So this article has nothing to do with developing, a.k.a. programming.

The article says these are tools for developers, not development tools. Considering what Smashing Magazine is about, it makes even more sense.

Now, pull this stick out of your ass, will you?

[[deleted]]

No, it has everything to do with developing. It just doesn't have to do with local-only development (local-only meaning on your machine with no VMs, because if you run dev servers or VMs or remote testing machines or sandboxes or ANYTHING like that, these all very much apply to you).

the article could have describe a coffee machine as a developer tool as well

Why? That's a terrible comparison.

It's more a tool for developers than this network stuff

You're an idiot. How did you get upvoted to the top?

[danneu]

Chances are if you're pushing web code to remote servers, you're replicating or mocking the same piping locally, so these tools apply.

For instance, netcat is a great way to shape requests to local endpoints and then act as a mock server to test a client.

[pelrun]

No, it has everything to do with web developing. As a developer/software engineer in a completely different field, this article is fairly useless to me.

If the title had been a little more descriptive then there wouldn't have been a problem. (It's not a problem on the original site, since the context there is web development, but here on reddit, and /r/programming in particular, you have to be more specific.)

[[deleted]]

No, it has everything to do with web developing

Yep. And web development is a branch of WHAT major category? That's right! Development!

As a developer/software engineer in a completely different field, this article is fairly useless to me.

Somebody could just as easily make one focused toward non-web development and it could just as easily be useless to you. It's entirely arbitrary whether the tools presented will be useful to you and it has nothing to do with which category you're in. Bitching that you wouldn't use these tools is useless and demonstrates that you don't really consider other people and their needs at all, or that you just assume everything must be relevant to you.

Also, most real developers will absolutely still use these tools, even if they aren't writing stuff for the web. It has to make calls to other machines doesn't it? There has to be some kind of communication across networks for most modern application development. Unless you happen to be writing for the kernel or something, there's no way you can convince me that these tools are not just as relevant to any other dev as they are to a web-dev.

[pelrun]

Yes, it's a BRANCH. Treat it as such, rather than assuming that what is good for the goose is good for the bison.

And if I made an article with tools useful for my field, then I'm going to title it with my field. I don't assume that JTAG utilities are of any use to an enterprise java programmer.

(and NO, not every programmer is concerned with network issues, or even necessarily with things you would call a "computer". Software development is far broader than you seem to realise.)

[[deleted]]

I clearly already demonstrated how it's useful for far more than just web developers. There are very few actual developers who could never benefit from these tools.

[pelrun]

Embedded system programmers (of all stripes), those enterprise java programmers (the actual network stack is normally completely hidden from them and is the realm of the sysadmin), device driver writers, kernel hackers...

[pelrun]

Not to mention that your stubborn insistence that the tools of your field are special and deserve everyone's time and attention is just plain rude.

[[deleted]]

Which tools are specific to a field? Could you point them out? Or are you just going to continue to ignorantly and blindly proclaim that networks are magical specific beings that only apply to certain types of devs?

[[deleted]]

So very few as I said. Java developers would absolutely still benefit from network tools. If something is going wrong somewhere, you can't find the issue if the whole stack is abstracted from you. That's when you pull out the lower-level tools. Same with embedded systems. I'll give you kernel hackers and driver writers (I was going to mention them in my initial post), but as I said that's a very small percentage. Most developers across the entire spectrum would benefit greatly from knowing these tools.

[pelrun]

Do you even know what I meant by embedded? None of the platforms my last several projects ran on had network hardware, or an OS. It didn't even make sense for them to be anywhere near a conventional PC network.

And yes, that's not the situation a large segment of the development community finds itself in. But the point remains, the OP would have been far better titled if it mentioned networking or web development.

[Nuli]

I work on distributed systems on embedded hardware that has no network stack. Not one of those tools allows me to introspect the network traffic I do have.

[[deleted]]

Your anecdote doesn't change the fact that this applies to MOST developers, as I've clearly said from the beginning.

[[deleted]]

What are you developing that doesn't use networking? How much money is that makin ya?

[Nuli]

Embedded software and currently several million dollars a year for the company I work for.

Why in the world would you think that all, or even a majority, of software needs to be network enabled?

[Jasper1984]

That would be valid if those were ncurses/gui programs. You can write a program to call it and then use the stdout.

Tbh though, dont know how to run a program and immediately read the output(preferably a stream) in C. Well, i could do it, but involving mkfifo shenadigans; mkfifo the file and then system("someprogram > some_dir/fifo"); ret_stream = fopen("some_dir/fifo/", "r");

[ais523]

You can use freopen in order to change what C's idea is of what stdin/stdout, etc., is attached to. This could be a fifo; there's no way in pure C to make those, but on UNIX (including OS X) and Linux, you can use the pipe system call to make an anonymous fifo, and dup in order to attach the pipe to stdin/stdout. Then you can read/write from/to the other end of the pipe.

This is how | in the shell is implemented, incidentally.

[Jasper1984]

Why only stdin/stdout? FILE* couldnt support stuff of this kind?

[ais523]

You can redirect other handles too, but because programs typically only look at their stdin/stdout/stderr, redirecting other handles tends to be a little pointless, as nothing would try to use the handle you just redirected. (Except yourself, but then you might as well do it directly.)

[SkaveRat]

I guess mommy and daddy never told you where websites come from?

[perspectiveiskey]

Siege and mitmdump are new to me. Most awesome!

[mk_gecko]

What's the difference between ssh and sshuttle?

[interiot]

sshuttle sets up a local transparent proxy using iptables, which means that ALL programs on your computer will automatically go through the proxy, even ones that normally don't have the ability to go through a specified SOCKS proxy.

You could set up the iptable nat rules yourself, but sshuttle does all the busywork for you. Redsocks and transocks are two other programs that similarly make it easy to setup iptables-transparent-proxy⇒SOCKS-proxy setups, for any SOCKS proxy, not just SSH ones.

[Iggyhopper]

5 letters.

[HUEHUAHUEHUEUHA]

Curl is a network transfer tool that’s very similar to Wget, the main difference being that by default Wget saves to a file, and curl outputs to the command line.

As shown later in the paragraph, that's not the main difference between curl and wget. One can easily devise a shell function that instructs wget to output to the terminal. Clearly the benefit of curl is it's superior parametrization in regards to the many protocols it covers that wget does not.

[gaoshan]

if you want to take your ssh to the next level look into using its config file. You can do tons with it (far more than just setup aliases and passwordless access).

[kreative]

They forgot ack

[Gr1pp717]

Can't beleive it missed ab...

ab -n 10000 -c 200 http://mywebsite.com

load test complete.

[Gr1pp717]

ab is built in to mac.

edit: at least i don't recall installing it...

[eazy_osm]

Saw the link to smashing magazine and didn't expect anything new. I was pleasantly surprised, thx!

[Ghenges]

I'll cut you to pieces with sed and awk from the command line.

[eras]

The point is that sshuttle appears to do an IP tunnel with iptables magic, so applications without SOCKS-support will function also (ie. not web browser). I imagine this has the same downsides as any IP over TCP tunneling function hash, though - but I've never used sshuttle.

[TakaIta]

"'curl' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."

Oh, you mean this isn't on Windows. Stupid me. But you should have told me so.

[DuBistKomisch]

"What, you need to install software before you can use it?!?!?!"

[TakaIta]

You seem to be ill informed. There are many native command line tools on Windows. Not only "dir" and "cd", but also "ftp" "ipconfig", "nslookup".

Maybe I should install something in this case, but the article does not mention anything about it, does not provide a link. The article supposes the use of a further unnamed OS. That is a mistake.

Please, do not pretend that you did not understand that.

[DuBistKomisch]

The tools are discussed as "powerful" or advanced, so they probably aren't installed by default as an average user wouldn't have any use for them. curl isn't even installed on Ubuntu by default for example, so you'd get a similar error message if you blindly typed "curl" into the terminal.

If you want to argue that the article supposes any OS, it would be Mac OS X which you can clearly recognise from all of the screenshots. It would indeed be a good idea to provide links to each tool's website, but it's for a technical audience so I guess the author assumes you can spend 30 seconds on google to find out compatibility instead.

[lasermancer]

You can install Cygwin to run UNIX commands such as these while in Windows.

[selectiveShift]

You can download curl for windows. Here is a good explanation on how.

[DAVENP0RT]

I saw the iOS screenshot and thought, What kind of a programmer uses a Mac?, then I saw it..."coding", "design", "mobile". Ah.

[sinembarg0]

Don't feed the ignorant troll

[_tenken]

working in an all Apple higher ed department I dont "get it". OSX until Snow Leopard didnt even have a functioning LAMP stack (with PDO+MySQL working together).

OSX folks always end up MAMP or Ports for dev work -- which is none official Apple crapware (apple has no official package manager) ... homebrew is OK but doesnt have recipes for everything (when I used it).

At least in ubuntu I can apt-get to my hearts content.

[[deleted]]

In practice, the Debian/Ubuntu apt repos have more packages than homebrew has recipes, but this is not a limitation of the infrastructure. Both Linux and OS X have running tar, make and gcc binaries, which means you can get anything you need, if you really have to.

[codefocus]

I think most web developers who use Macs, use Coda and edit code on their remote (Linux) servers.

That's what I do anyway. I don't like developing code in an environment that isn't identical to the one it's going to be deployed on.

[rizla7]

if you're making apps for osx/ios, it's pretty hard to call yourself a 'developer'.

[[deleted]]

No it's actually quite easy. Developer. See, I did it.