I’ve long kept a list of tools to help me brainstorm when I go off to spelunk through a given problem or system. As such, the tools are divided into a few broad categories.

I figured it’d be helpful to publish it here–the goal is to have a living version of this document, so I’ll update it as needed from time to time. Feel free to submit changes to add or improve something!

Many of these have an enhanced version in gnu core utils (brew install coreutils) prefixed with a g. If available, it allows for a consistent experience across different *nix systems, as some builtins have slightly different option sets and behavior between OSes, such as Linux versus macOS.

Binary executables

• otool
• lipo
• dwarfdump
• nm
• strings
• dsymutil
• objdump
• uuencode/uudecode
• patch
• xxd

Networking

• scutil
• ifconfig
• curl
• ping
• traceroute
• netstat
• nslookup
• whois
• hostname
• tcpdump
• ssh
• ftp
• scp
• host
• telnet (removed from macOS starting with High Sierra)
• wget†
• iwlist†
• iwconfig†
• ufw†
• nc*: netcat
• dsh*: distributed shell, multiple concurrent SSH sessions
• awscli*: AWS CLI
• scout2*: AWS security auditing

System

• ls
• file
• lsof
• top
• ps
• finger
• fswatch
• stat/readlink
• du/df
• kill
• killall
• fuser
• uname
• whoami
• pwd
• env
• screen
• systemctl†
• service†
• tree*
• tmux*: terminal multiplexer; terminal split-pane screen sessions
• tmuxinator*: script and manage tmux sessions

Stream processing

• xargs
• awk
• cat
• echo
• sed
• tail
• head
• less
• more
• cut
• tee
• grep
• jq*: JSON manipulation
• ag*: The Silver Searcher, a grep alternative