Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I’m surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
I think a lot of people don’t realise that yt-dlp works for many sites, not just YouTube
I used it recently for watching a video from tiktok without having to use their god awful web UI and it was amazing
It also supports ripping playlists. Fantastic to archive a set locally…
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
Wait how?
I just run
mpv $URLThis is the only way to watch twitch
With their huge, clunky UI and my 1080p screen, yeah it is.
mpv --ytdl URL. Read starting from --ytdl option in the mpv man page, you can even give specific yt-dlp options through --ytdl-raw-options.
Since everyone keeps mentioning yt-dlp I gotta ask: what’s wrong with the original youtube-dl? I keep using it, it works, it’s still being updated.
yt-dlp has sponsorblock features, youtube-dl does not.
There are minor feature differences there’s also a convenience factor: youtube-dl people for some reason stopped doing releases, so you can’t get a fresh version from pypi (only installing from github or their site). Yt-dlp is on pypi, including nightly builds.
The huge list of sites can be found here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/tree/master/yt_dlp/extractor