4 Extremely Useful 'Hidden' Linux Commands: Explained

Explore 4 extremely useful 'hidden' Linux commands, including the key concepts, practical examples, important considerations, and useful guidance.

Every power user should know at least the basics. A little knowledge of the shell and a few useful bash shortcuts can make your day-to-day work considerably faster. There are also a number of lesser-known commands that hardly anyone talks about, yet are surprisingly useful.

Search even faster with fzf

Most Linux distributions give you a pretty fast system-wide search, but there's one way that's even faster and superior to all the others.

Fzf is a small terminal utility that uses fuzzy matching to find files. This basically means that you don't need to type in the exact or full file name to find what you're looking for. Just type in a few characters, even in random order, and it will automatically find the closest matches.

It's available through almost every mainstream package manager, so you can install fzf by running the regular install command and adding fzf to the end.

Once done, just run the following command to open a file manager-style interface right in the terminal. Here, you can search for files and get the file path instantly.

fzf --style full --preview 'fzf-preview.sh {}' --bind 'focus:transform-header:file --brief {}'

Use tldr instead of man

tldr does the same thing as man, but as the name suggests, it provides the simplest possible explanation of the command. For example, if you want to know how the git command works, you just type:

tldr git

See the comparison below, with man on the left, and tldr on the right explaining the same command.

There's obviously no competition between these two commands in terms of simplicity. But choose tldr over man every time. If your system doesn't already have tldr, you can install it using a package manager, like fzf.

Note : Although this tool is called tldr, the official package name is tlcr, so make sure to use that name when installing.

• Why is tldr command better than man command in Linux?

Alias makes your life a lot faster

Alias is another command that can save you a lot of time. They are essentially custom shortcuts that you can assign to any command in your terminal. If you find yourself repeating the same long string of text over and over again, aliases can be a lifesaver.

For example, instead of running the same long command over and over again to update the system, you can simply set up an alias for it like this:

alias update = "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y"

Now all you need to do is type the update command, and the terminal will run the entire command.

The only thing to note is that aliases don't exist by default, and you'll need to add them to your shell configuration file. I've already added an alias to the fzf command I mentioned earlier, since it's so long. Now just enter the filesearch command, and the entire command will be executed immediately.

Understanding the startup process with systemd-analyze

Systemd is the core system and service manager used by most modern Linux distributions. It handles everything in the boot space and manages things like which services start, in what order, and how long they take to start.

So systemd can tell you exactly why your system might be taking so long to boot, instead of making you guess. The first command you should try is:

systemd-analyze

This command gives you a full rundown of the boot process across all major components of the operating system. But if you want to dig deeper, you can run this command:

systemd-analyze blame

This command will also list every service that started during boot, sorted by the start time of each service. It's perfect for spotting slow services right away.

And if that's not enough, you can even create a full visual timeline of your startup process:

systemd-analyze plot > bootanalysis.png

This will generate an SVG file that shows each service, their startup times, and how they stack up against each other. Open this file in your browser and you'll see a full diagram of what's going on inside.

This command is extremely useful when problems start occurring, perhaps after installing a new app or applying an update.