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Linux
Linux was originally developed as a free operating system for personal computers but is currently used for more computer platforms than any other operating system.
Free software is primarily a matter of liberty, not price: users, individually or collectively, are free to do whatever they want with it - this includes the freedom ... to sell it
Our goal is to increase awareness of open source and to assist everyone in leveraging its economic and social value. Learn how to use open source to create opportunity and wealth. Linux
A typical Linux distribution will consist of thousands of programs and will install most commonly used capabilities by default. This will likely include shells, editors, eMail programs and system utilities.
The available programs and capabilities can be increased by installing additional programs. There are many versions and variants of almost every program and new programs are being added frequently.
This page lists a few programs that provide commonly used functions. Review the page on Linux Commands and Concepts as well as the Linux Manual Pages to learn more about available programs and how they work.
Editing
Spell
Spell is a command-line spell-checking program. It reads through a text input and prints each misspelled word on a line of its own. It is implemented as a wrapper for GNU aspell or ispell. (doc)
Aspell
Aspell is a spell-checker which can be used either as a library or as a standalone program. Notable features of Aspell include its full support of documents written in the UTF-8 encoding and its ability to use multiple dictionaries, including personal ones. (doc)
Diction
A package providing two classic Unix commands, style and diction. Diction is used to identify wordy and commonly misused phrases in a body of text. Style instead analyzes surface aspects of a written work, such as sentence length and other readability measures. (doc)
Emacs
GNU Emacs is an extensible and highly customizable text editor. It is based on an Emacs Lisp interpreter with extensions for text editing. Emacs has been extended in essentially all areas of computing, giving rise to a vast array of packages supporting, e.g., email, IRC and XMPP messaging, spreadsheets, remote server editing, and much more. Emacs includes extensive documentation on all aspects of the system, from basic editing to writing large Lisp programs. It has full Unicode support for nearly all human languages. (doc)
Programming
GCC
GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. It provides compiler front-ends for several languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. It also includes runtime support libraries for these languages. (doc)
GDB
GDB is the GNU debugger. With it, you can monitor what a program is doing while it runs or what it was doing just before a crash. It allows you to specify the runtime conditions, to define breakpoints, and to change how the program is running to try to fix bugs. It can be used to debug programs written in C, C++, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal and more. (doc)
Gdbm
GDBM is a library for manipulating hashed databases. It is used to store key/value pairs in a file in a manner similar to the Unix dbm library and provides interfaces to the traditional file format. (doc)
Make
Make is a program that is used to control the production of executables or other files from their source files. The process is controlled from a Makefile, in which the developer specifies how each file is generated from its source. It has powerful dependency resolution and the ability to determine when files have to be regenerated after their sources change. GNU make offers many powerful extensions over the standard utility. (doc)
DDD
GNU DDD, the Data Display Debugger, is a graphical front-end for command-line debuggers. Many back-end debuggers are supported, notably the GNU debugger, GDB. In addition to usual debugging features such as viewing the source files, DDD has additional graphical, interactive features to aid in debugging. (doc)
Imaging
GIFT
The GNU Image-Finding Tool (GIFT) is a Content Based Image Retrieval System. It uses the content of images to perform queries on a collection, enabling you to query by example. Also, a tool to index whole directory trees is included. (doc)
GIMP
GIMP is an application for image manipulation tasks such as photo retouching, composition and authoring. It supports all common image formats as well as specialized ones. It features a highly customizable interface that is extensible via a plugin system. (doc)
Games
Chess
GNU Chess is a chess engine. It allows you to compete against the computer in a game of chess, either through the default terminal interface or via an external visual interface such as GNU XBoard. (doc)
Robots
GNU Robots is a game in which you program a robot to explore a world full of enemies that can hurt it, obstacles and food to be eaten. The goal of the game is to stay alive and collect prizes. The robot program conveniently may be written in a plain text file in the Scheme programming language. (doc)
Files
Less
GNU less is a pager, a program that allows you to view large amounts of text in page-sized chunks. Unlike traditional pagers, it allows both backwards and forwards movement through the document. It also does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so it starts faster than most text editors. (doc)
Sed
Sed is a non-interactive, text stream editor. It receives a text input from a file or from standard input and it then applies a series of text editing commands to the stream and prints its output to standard output. It is often used for substituting text patterns in a stream. The GNU implementation offers several extensions over the standard utility. (doc)
Grep
grep is a tool for finding text inside files. Text is found by matching a pattern provided by the user in one or many files. The pattern may be provided as a basic or extended regular expression, or as fixed strings. By default, the matching text is simply printed to the screen, however the output can be greatly customized to include, for example, line numbers. GNU grep offers many extensions over the standard utility, including, for example, recursive directory searching. (doc)
Findutils
Findutils supplies the basic file directory searching utilities of the GNU system. It consists of two primary searching utilities: find recursively searches for files in a directory according to given criteria and locate lists files in a database that match a query. Two auxiliary tools are included: updatedb updates the file name database and xargs may be used to apply commands with arbitrarily long arguments. (doc)
Web
Wget
GNU Wget is a non-interactive tool for fetching files using the HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It can resume interrupted downloads, use filename wild cards, supports proxies and cookies, and it can convert absolute links in downloaded documents to relative links. (doc)
Httptunnel
GNU httptunnel creates a bidirectional data path tunneled in HTTP requests. This allows users behind firewalls to send and receive data that would otherwise be blocked, such as telnet or ssh connections. (doc)
Utilities
Gzip
GNU Gzip provides data compression and decompression utilities; the typical extension is .gz. Unlike the zip format, it compresses a single file; as a result, it is often used in conjunction with tar, resulting in .tar.gz or .tgz, etc. (doc)
Tar
Tar provides the ability to create tar archives, as well as the ability to extract, update or list files in an existing archive. It is useful for combining many files into one larger file, while maintaining directory structure and file information such as permissions and creation/modification dates. GNU tar offers many extensions over the standard utility. (doc)
RCS
RCS is the original Revision Control System. It works on a file-by-file basis, in contrast to subsequent version control systems such as CVS, Subversion, and Git. This can make it suitable for system administration files, for example, which are often inherently local to one machine. (doc)
Teaching
GNUschool
GNUschool is a web application for students, teachers and school administrators. With it, teachers can create tests for the students to take online, give feedback and assign grades. School administrators can use it to monitor student attendance and edit student information. (doc)
Shell
Bash
Bash is the shell, or command-line interpreter, of the GNU system. It is compatible with the Bourne Shell, but it also integrates useful features from the Korn Shell and the C Shell and new improvements of its own. It allows command-line editing, unlimited command history, shell functions and aliases, and job control while still allowing most sh scripts to be run without modification. (doc)