An old Sysadmin tries to learn new tricks

I learned Linux in the mid 90s, and all of the commandline utilities I use on a daoily basis are the same ones that I learned over 25 years ago. Over the past few years I keep reading articles like: 17 Stunning & Modern UNIX Tools and Modern Alternatives to Some of the Classic Linux Commands extolling the virtues of tools like fzf and ripgrep and fd.

I’ve always looked on these tools as “People with too much time on their hands rewriting it all in rust or go” and I still don’t think I’m entirely wrong. I’ve gotten so used to the standard unix toolkit that I’m sure I’m blind to any flaws.

As well, the systems I maintain are all heavily locked down and very specialized so installing these tools usually require more work than “dnf install foo” as well as needing to basically justify to the higher-ups why I need to install such a tool. “But it’s better” is not usually a good justification.

So I’ve always looked at these articles and went “Bah! Humbug!” But I recently found this article Find anything you need with fzf, the Linux fuzzy finder tool and am trying to fight my inner Cranky old Sysadmin and try a new trick or two