Discovered 'moreutils' package in Ubuntu. It features a list of nice tools, of which my favorite are 'ts', 'pee' and 'vipe'.
'ts' puts timestamps to every line of text that is piped through it. Like,
$ ping google.com|ts Dec 14 14:18:45 PING google.com (209.85.173.104) 56(84) bytes of data. Dec 14 14:18:45 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=88.5 ms Dec 14 14:18:46 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=92.5 ms Dec 14 14:18:47 64 bytes from lpp01m01-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.173.104): icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=90.5 ms
I love timestamps! I put them everywhere I can, it helps so much to find out later what was going on. 'ts' will certainly help me.
Another tool is 'pee'. As 'man pee' puts it, it's like 'tee', but for pipes. 'pee' reads standard input and sends it to a number of commands supplied as arguments to 'pee'. Like,
$ cat file.txt |pee 'wc -c' 'wc -w' 'wc -l' 5870 257 257
And, finally, 'vipe' — it's a way to edit data produced by one program before they are piped into another one. 'sed' is good enough, but when some interactivity is needed, 'vipe' should be handy.
