Today I thought I might suggest a little bit of summer reading, now the good weather has finally arrived in the UK! Some are a little off the beaten track, with less explicit links to free software; all of them, in my opinion, will be of interest to anybody visiting this website. So, read the list, pay a visit to Amazon and grab the nearest bottle of sun cream!

This nifty little tool couples the terminal with a database of frequently-used commands. So if you need to execute a specific command, you don't have to type it manually and remember all its parameters. Instead, select the command from the list and hit the Apply button.

The ls command is a well-known and often used command-line program that is used to list directory contents by name; in fact, it could be argued that it is the most used Linux command-line program.

lsof is used to LiSt Open Files, hence the command’s name. It’s a handy tool normally used to list the open files on a system along with the associated processes or users, and can also be used to gather information on your system’s network connections. When run without options, lsof lists all open files along with all of the active processes that have them open.

Almost every Linux website seems to have a list of the "best command line commands". Sometimes they get them wrong. Here is a list of useful commands that I came up with by looking at my 'history' file.

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.

Have you looked at the HCL (Hardware Compatibly List) for your preferred Linux distribution lately? Do you see it? Exactly, it's a mess. Even with a strong community effort working to keep the list updated and as fresh as possible, it's nearly impossible to make the list worth the page it's rendered on.

Over the course of writing The Linux Command Line and this blog, I've had frequent need of good reference resources for command line programs including the shell itself. Here is my list of the ones that stand out:

fdupes is a simple Command Line utility to find and list duplicate files in the specified directories. fdupes can also delete the found duplicate files if instructed. fdupes can follow Symlinks and can be instructed to ignore hardlinks. fdupes can also show the size of the duplicate files. fdupes is a simple and very efficient tool, easy to use.