A catalog of 134 alternative tools for the Linux, Unix and macOS command line. The site lists alternatives to common Unix utilities such as grep, ps, wc, dig and gzip, and shows recently added or updated tools with descriptions, languages and dates.
Maestral is an open source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux. It offers a command line interface, a lightweight native GUI for macOS and a Qt-based interface for Linux, and can sync multiple Dropbox accounts. It supports .mignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing. As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained.
Elvish is a shell with useful interactive features built in and a scripting language. It is distributed as a single statically linked binary for Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows. Scripts use data structures and functional programming, errors are caught before execution, and command failures abort execution by default.
GNU Bash is the GNU Project's shell, an sh-compatible shell that incorporates features from the Korn shell and the C shell. It is intended to conform to the POSIX Shell and Tools standard and offers improvements over sh for programming and interactive use. Most sh scripts can run by Bash without modification. It includes command-line editing, job control, shell functions and aliases, and indexed arrays.
explainshell.com is a web tool that matches command-line arguments to their help text. Users write down a command line to see the help text that matches each argument. The page includes numerous shell command examples.
AnyTXT Searcher is a desktop full-text search application that extracts text from documents and indexes it for searching. It supports formats including plain text, Word, Excel, PDF, and images via offline OCR, and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Netcat (nc) is a networking tool available on Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD. It can be used for port scanning, file transfers, simple servers, reverse shells and debugging. The page also lists installation commands for several distributions and example commands.
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Maestral is an open source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux. It offers a command line interface, a lightweight native GUI for macOS and a Qt-based interface for Linux, and can sync multiple Dropbox accounts. It supports .mignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing. As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained.
Elvish is a shell with useful interactive features built in and a scripting language. It is distributed as a single statically linked binary for Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows. Scripts use data structures and functional programming, errors are caught before execution, and command failures abort execution by default.
GNU Bash is the GNU Project's shell, an sh-compatible shell that incorporates features from the Korn shell and the C shell. It is intended to conform to the POSIX Shell and Tools standard and offers improvements over sh for programming and interactive use. Most sh scripts can run by Bash without modification. It includes command-line editing, job control, shell functions and aliases, and indexed arrays.
explainshell.com is a web tool that matches command-line arguments to their help text. Users write down a command line to see the help text that matches each argument. The page includes numerous shell command examples.
AnyTXT Searcher is a desktop full-text search application that extracts text from documents and indexes it for searching. It supports formats including plain text, Word, Excel, PDF, and images via offline OCR, and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Netcat (nc) is a networking tool available on Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD. It can be used for port scanning, file transfers, simple servers, reverse shells and debugging. The page also lists installation commands for several distributions and example commands.
