Terminal tools

Think GUIs are for wimps? More of a terminal type? Try these…

2023-03-07 -

BASH

Strap in for a thrill ride! Bash, short for the Bourne-Again Shell, is the GNU Project’s Unix shell and command language that was originally released in 1989 by Chet Ramey. It was the free software replacement for the Version 7 Unix Borne shell (sh) released in 1977. This suspended the Mashey shell used with Version 4 Unix in 1973, which itself was a replacement of the Thompson shell (sh)

that was written by Ken Thompson himself for the original 1971 Unix.

In most distros, if you run echo $0 in the terminal, you’ll likely get the output of Bash,

as that’s the base command language in Debian and thus Ubuntu and beyond. There are alternatives, such as Fish, which offers advanced tab completion, search as you type autosuggestion, syntax highlighting and global variables.

DETAILS

WEB: http://gnu.org/ software/bash

AGE: 8th June 1989 1989; 33 years ago

VERSION: 5.2.15

LICENCE: GPL 3+

GNU Emacs

The original Editor MACroS (Emacs) was written by Richard Stallman after he saw work back in 1976 at Stanford AI Lab and its E editor, this was written to replace the 1960s TECO software designed for paper tape editing that could only support separate read, write and edit modes. The new editor was extendable through macros and so E with MACroS was born.

GNU Emacs is Stallman’s free software implementation of Emacs and was the first released GNU project in 1985. It offers extensive enhancements through plug-in macros written using its built-in Emacs Lisp interpreter – so extensive that many have joked it’s an editor with ambitions on being an operating system. You can, with work, largely manage your entire workflow from within GNU Emacs, including file management and email.

DETAILS

WEB: www.gnu.org/ software/emacs/

AGE: 20th March 1985; 37 years ago

VERSION: 28.2

LICENCE: GPL 3+

Samba

Samba has been around for almost as long as Linux itself and started as a university-based reverse engineering project of the Netbios network protocol plus interoperability with the Microsoft LAN Manager started by Andrew Tridgell. It became GPL licenced in 1993 and its name is derived from grep -i ‘^s.*m.*b’ /usr/ share/dict/words after the original was hit with a trademark notice.

Samba implements the Server Message Block (SMB) communication protocol on Unix systems. SMB was originally developed at IBM (1983) for shared networked resource access on OS/2 systems. In 1987, Microsoft integrated it into its LAN Manager and released SMB 1.0 in 1996. The protocol was hit with a number of serious security flaws, so SMB 1 is now disabled by default, causing access issues on older systems.

DETAILS

WEB: www. samba.org

AGE: January 1992; 31 years ago

VERSION: 4.17.5

LICENCE: GPL 3+

Links

A powerful and clever terminalbased HTML4.0 web browser that’s capable of text, graphical rendering and custom font support via its Links2 release. Not to be confused with the similar text-only web browser Lynx, Links can display text-only to the terminal and offers pull-down menus with both keyboard and mouse-based navigation for those who need lightweight, text-only terminal browsing.

DETAILS

WEB: http://links. twibright.com

AGE: 1999; 24 years ago

VERSION: 2.28

LICENCE: GPL 2+

Cowsay

Getting ASCII cows to read announcements and more likely piped fortunes is a tradition of Unix that seems like it might be finally falling out of fashion, but we’re here to ensure it at least gets another mention in print before we fall out of fashion. The GPL-released version of Cowsay you’ll likely have in your repo was ported to Perl by Tony Monroe back in 1999. Install with sudo apt install cowsay and then try cowsay -f tux moooo .