Cool Linux Tools

Lately I have been experimenting with a couple tools for my Linux machine and I figured I would share them with you guys.

feh This little app is a command line image viewer. If you need to look at a picture quickly and don't want to open up a heavy weight image viewer you just run "feh [filename]" and you can view your picture, close it with Ctrl-C and then be on your way.

convert This program is great for when you need to quickly convert a picture between file formats. You call "convert [input] [ouput]" and have a quickly converted image. It's also very powerful and has alot of extra options if you need high quality copies or want to resize the photo. So far, I haven't come across an image format it can't parse.

screen I've just recently started using screen when running my myriad of ssh terminals at work. I typically am ssh'ed into about 4 or 5 different machines at a time and will typically be running about 3 processes on each of them. I can open up a separate tab for each process and that works, however it really clutters up my terminal window. Also, the wireless connection in the building can be spotty at times and so I will sometimes end up getting disconnected from my ssh connections loosing all of those processes which is a serious pain. This program acts as a sort of terminal multiplexer, you can run up to 9 different terminals from a single window which is fantastic, but not the coolest part. The most fantastic part about this application is that you can disconnect from the screen session and then reconnect later, leaving all of those programs running in the background. You can even share the screen session allowing multiple users to access it.

Edit: Change some of the text that was getting parsed as HTML tags.