Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago

I find sponge really useful. Have you ever wanted to process a file through a pipeline and write the output back to the file? If you do it the naive way, it won’t work, and you’ll end up losing the contents of your file: awk '{do_stuff()}' myfile.txt | sort -u | column --table > myfile.txt The shell will truncate myfile.txt before awk (or whatever command) has a chance to read it. So you can use sponge instead, which waits until…

Nice collection of quite useful tools. Some of these can be easily replicated by using a more modern shell (bash, zsh) like mispipe, others are just shortcuts (e.g. ifne, chronic). But what immediately stood out to me is `vidir`. I really like the idea of editing file names with an editor. Using loops and regex in a shell for mass renaming can be a mess. It should be way easier with `vim`. This tool made me install moreutils.

This is a pretty good collection of small utilities but I would recommend using GNU Parallel[0] instead of the included parallel. It contains a ton of extremely useful additional features such as distributing jobs to remote computers. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/