11 Cool Command Line Programs You Need to See

[@ThioJoe]

🧐Updates: • PDFCPU now supports the "decrypt" command (and some others) for PDF 2.0 files as of version v0.8.0, allowing you to remove edit protection for them 📝 Some tips based on questions I've seen a couple times: • For basically all of these, you need to run them from within the command line, NOT by double clicking, otherwise it will just pop up the cmd window and immediately close. On recent versions of Windows, you can do this by right clicking in the folder with the exe and clicking "Open in Terminal". If you don't see the option this tutorial page might help: www.elevenforum.com/t/add-or-remove-open-in-terminal-context-menu-in-windows-11.2479/ • To make it so you can run the 'cheat' program (and any others you want) without having to navigate to the folder containing the exe file first, you can add the location of such exe's to the so-called "PATH environment variable". Basically Windows has a built-in list of locations in Windows, where if an exe is in one of those locations, you can still run the program by doing like "cheat.exe" even if the cmd window isn't opened in the same folder as the exe. This video is a good tutorial on how to edit this setting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pni1qGSYnMdknbc

[@sketchtherapy1218]

yt-dlp doesn't work it just closes when you paste.

[@danbromberg]

You left out a lot on how to implement CHEAT for Windows; you should've said upfront that this is for Linux users. Even the GitHub doc states the following: TODO: community support is requested here. Please open a PR if you'd like to contribute installation instructions for Windows. Kudos to those of you who got it to work on Windows; please share how you did it.

[@uooooooooh]

@@danbromberg It's for Windows, he shows it running under Windows, and he even has a batch script serving as a wrapper for it.

[@danbromberg]

@@uooooooooh Thanks! I found ThioJ's 'c.bat' file but can't find where to download 'cheat.exe'

[@danbromberg]

@@uooooooooh I saw the script but where does the executable: 'cheat.exe' come from?

[@edems131]

0:00 - Intro 0:20 - Cheat 3:34 - YT-DLP ( video downloader ) 4:30 - ImageMagick ( format converter ) 6:16 - FFmpeg ( edit / convert mp4 ) 7:11 - Err.exe ( cheatsheet for errors ) 7:50 - ExifTool ( metadata edit ) 8:44 - Pandoc ( convert ) 9:22 - PDFCPU ( edit secured pdf ) 11:03 - XPDF Tools ( pdf convert ) 11:44 - Tokei ( source code stats ) 12:12 - Hyperfine ( speed of commands )

[@edwinrosales6322]

Thanks!

[@astropgn]

"FFMPEG: The most widely used multimedia transcoder on at least two planets" - The team behind ffmpeg added this into a presentation because Nasa uses it in some of their rovers on Mars to transcode their videos before sending back to Earth.

[@ottergauze]

That's wild. Not many software devs can make that kind of claim.

[@xanderplayz3446]

Wait what

[@msmit1999]

Huge flex

[@_tr11]

That actually pretty wild bro. Imagine being so popular your software is used on 2 whole different planets

[@knottytoob]

Astro for the general person/ noob :) AstroGPN

[@Didz]

If you want GUI based tools or are scared of the command line here are some: Open Video Downloader is a front-end for yt-dlp and FFmpeg Handbrake is a front-end for FFmpeg IrfanView can edit images and shows all EXIF information and JPEG quality (press I) Mp3Tag can edit metadata of audio files but it can also edit video containers like MP4 and MKV including inserting images There are many more out there, tell us other good tools. 😀 Bit of history... outdated now but I remember using RazorLame which was a front-end for LAME for encoding MP3s back in 2003 in the Windows XP days. Now LAME lives on within FFmpeg.

[@charliesretrocomputing]

never knew that about HandBrake!

[@F_Around_and_find_out]

VLC is also a ffmpeg GUI frontend. It is a mile better than the basic video player that Microsoft use.

[@Didz]

@@F_Around_and_find_out VLC installs its own set of codecs. If you want more use out of playback software that uses system codecs install a codec pack such as K-Lite Codec Pack Mega

[@danhorus]

IrfanView is the best. Been using it for more than a decade

[@markae0]

Open Video Downloader stops working after ? a month

[@NoramiYuuki]

honestly, my favorite is yt dlp. it's probably one of the most used tools out of this list by your average day to day person, and it's also the most useful one to me, somebody who constantly does editing, clipping, archiving etc.. thanks again for yet another fantastic video!

[@vinching926]

Same here, using yt-dlp and ffmpeg in cli make me feel less braindead in the process on getting sources, it's just KISS principle all the way

[@justice32legends]

This video is a gem. I wanna jump into every single program you've compiled here right now.

[@iPandora08]

a cli tool I've found to be useful is tldr. it takes the man/info commands from Mac/Linux, and and lists the most common uses for the command :)

[@flanger001]

Cheat reminded me very much of tldr!

[@Purely_Andy]

tldr *is* cheat

[@ThioJoe]

Extremely epic and awesome and good

[@awethebird]

Best youtuber

[@_tr11]

Truly indeed

[@Alex-bs4sy]

No, I hate him and his content Jk

[@ego-lay_atman-bay]

Why are you in your own members section?

[@brunocamposquenaoeoyoutuber]

Hi

[@gavincstewart]

One of your best videos yet, thank you!!

[@TheWilro]

I love your Videos. Unbelievably useful! Definitely saw some tools and features here that I was not aware of yet. Much appreciated mate.

[@abdulbasit0123]

Love it, We need part two please

[@NiyaKouya]

May not quite fit the criteria you set for those tools you picked, but to add another one for people who prefer the console: winget It's included in Win 10 and 11 and lets you install and update a quite big variety of programs without having to hunt for their individual installation packages. Might not (yet) be as mighty as the linux equivalents (apt, dnf & co), but it's still a neat helper.

[@kevbu4]

It's always good to make sure new people know about winget. It's a really awesome tool. And for anyone who hasn't seen Joe's video about winget, check out "Windows FINALLY Got a Package Manager - Here's Why It's Awesome".

[@no_name4796]

Yeah, honestly that's just so nice for whenever i am forced to use windows Although it differs from linux package managers, as in linux you really install packages, while in windows you actually install the app. So it's easier on windows to install stuff like zoom for example, but at the same time linux pm give you such a level of customization, windows can't even dream about

[@ego-lay_atman-bay]

I love ffmpeg, I use it all the time to split, merge, and compress videos. It's just makes me feel I have more control over the output than the gui video editors for mobile.

[@content_ai_]

@ThioJoe you forgot unsilence, it removes the silent parts of videos and audio, its super nice

[@ckingpro]

Extracting PDF images using either of the two tools you mentioned is a lot better than Windows + Shift + S or Cmd + Shift + S and selecting the region. Thanks for that!

[@dani33300]

10:10 Paper tiger" is a calque of the Chinese phrase zhǐlǎohǔ The term refers to something or someone that claims or appears to be powerful or threatening but is not ...

[@LeonderGrunder]

Winget is also crazy cool, because it is not restricted by schools.

[@moregainfor]

This video has just made me love cmd. Thanks a lot, this has been very helpful

[@surject]

Happened to me in 1986 already.

[@jovetj]

@@surject Happened to me in 1982. Though, technically speaking, cmd.exe didn't exist yet. hahah

[@anamoyeee]

Tokei is definitely my favourite, seeing how many files and lines of code i have written for a certain project is just so nice to have

[@rochellerochelle1488]

This, good sir, earned both a like and a subscription.

[@pyp2205]

Well this is definitely going to be handy, since I spend most of the time on the terminal. I would usually write scripts to automate stuff, just to save time and not worry about forgetting a command.

[@SperkSan]

Some people's voice, like Joe or Jason (from DDOI), is so soothing that people would buy ASMR of them.

[@Rakusan2]

I question the use case of hyperfine since I tend to use the Powershell commandlet 'Measure-Command'

[@CedroCron]

I knew about none of these, I like them all. Thanks! ... Ugreen looks like a great competitor for Snology, but I'm worried about their security both because of their size compared to Synology and because of them being a Chinese company. For home users I guess it's ok if you want to take the risk with your data not knowing the company. I will say though they make high quality products like cables etc. as I've purchased these on Amazon when needed and no "mysterious" chips in the connectors of these cables when X-Rayed

[@samuelshubert]

Omg this speeds up a lot of. I needed this!

[@stephenluttrell8958]

Cheat is going to be a time saver. I have a bunch of txt files with command line examples.

[@WannesVantorre]

As a programmer i LOVE hyperfine. it truely is hyper fine.

[@xa3558]

Thank you, Thio !

[@NewStreamLine]

Thx a million for this video. Now we definitely need a video about corresponding GUIs. 🙂

[@pabloqp7929]

Windows CLI barely mimics a fraction of Bash's power

[@jovetj]

Quit Bashing Windows.

[@ashleyjaytanna1953]

​​@@jovetjAgree....Bin bashing windows

[@pstzz]

Thank you @ThioJoe! You're doing amazing things to make Windows users' lives easier. Can't wait to try out some of these tools and scripts...

[@jsnotlout3312]

Imagine magic is amazing, I used it to convert scanned documents into a pdf and then email them with a time stamp name using a power shell script

[@knoxduder]

PDF-toolkit has been around for over a decade and is awesome!

[@unclecomrade_yt]

Finally, I found the easy way to quickly get some jpegs lighter. Thank you! And it's nice of you to write scripts to make it easier to use, good job!

[@670839245]

Cheat doesn't have an install instruction for Windows in its documentation. There is a Powershell script in the pull requests for automatic downloading and extracting the program, but you can also just download the windows version from releases, put the exe in PATH, and rename it to cheat.exe

[@rwfrench66GenX]

Great video! I’ve been stressing for months trying to get Microsoft Store to work since I updated to Windows Pro 11 last year. I’ve tried every fix on at least 200 websites, I’ve updated Windows, the Bios, all firmware, all drivers, I’ve made sure all the services related to the Store are on, and the registry, I checked my Microsoft account, but I can’t update the Store or get any of my apps or games I downloaded from the Store to update. The error code has been reported, I called Microsoft and they literally hung up when I said I was calling about the Store. It works fine on my iPad!

[@xavvvvxd]

Interesting! Definitely gonna get Cheat, an absolute life saver by the looks of it

[@rohinhans7819]

have you gotten it yet? I just started to use it, but cant seem to use the search feature as he does in the video lol

[@US_Joe]

Cool stuff -Thanx Joe 👍👍👍

[@lifebleeds86]

So Cheat is the windows version of man for Linux but it isn't anywhere near as good?

[@ottergauze]

Eeeh, man pages aren't great if you just want fast example uses. It can still be pretty overwhelming since they're designed to be comprehensive. This is supposed to be a custom way of getting notes that is easy to understand at a glance.

[@GiorgioAresu]

More akin to tldr than man

[@DccToon]

m a n

[@JaySee5]

Cheat is actually mainly for Linux.

[@shanent5793]

Get-Help is more like man

[@pangoomis]

No mention of SFK - Swiss File Knife? Its instant FTP server makes it super trivial for me to move data to/from retro PCs, and it has, so, so much more tools!

[@MrComputer2016]

This is a nice video bro ❤

[@soulstenance]

'cheat' sounds a lot like running a command with --help or running 'man some-command' on Linux. Very useful! Even the nerdiest of us can't possibly remember every single command/argument. 😁

[@niezzayt3809]

Question: Can image magick create WebP picture but by using VP9 codec algorithm? The default is still VP8 last time I checked

[@xanderplayz3446]

Why do you need it? I mean if you are uploading to youtube it accepts pretty much every codec.

[@niezzayt3809]

@@xanderplayz3446 I never said I gonna upload it to KZbin. Does KZbin even accept WebP pictures? It's for a responsive website that could utilize blazing fast images loading compared to inferior JPEG. The only problem is that most WebP tutorials are using VP8 which is kind of Blurry. But VP9 is like HEVC quality but for static image.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

But can it enable the halt and catch fire routine?

[@ottergauze]

Pretty sure thats just what happens when you encode large videos with ffmpeg, honestly.

[@uooooooooh]

xz almost did that for me, popped a capacitor on my motherboard once lmao

[@xanderplayz3446]

@@uoooooooohSeriously?

[@uooooooooh]

​@@xanderplayz3446Obviously there's no reason to think it was xz in particular, but I decided to give it some nutty numbers to have it use pretty much every bit of power the computer had. Partway through the system totally hanged and became unresponsive to even holding the power button, so I flipped the switch on the PSU on and off, and when it wouldn't respond to anything after that I opened it up and saw a burst capacitor. Fortunately my GPUs and drives weren't damaged, carried them over to an old computer that was slated for recycling from work (and after a quick reconfiguring of GRUB from a live USB, it all just worked- yay, Linux!) and then to my current PC.

[@Greenskiii]

where did you get those desk lamps?

[@ax--media]

Finally, I no longer have to use those sketchy online converters. :D

[@UmitSeyhan75]

Winget and aria2 are awesome.

[@Lampe2020]

I think on Linux there is an actual ImageMagick GUI, e.g. preinstalled on RasPiOS.

[@JoaoLuisSR]

Please, how do you use your script YT-DLP with PowerShell?

[@minefreak2000]

How the f have I not heard of Err! That's awesome, thank you!

[@mucookul]

I believe there is a tool built into windows that does something similar to the err command It comes up sometimes in “enterprise” windows versions like education edition

[@ThioJoe]

Hmm 🤔

[@cryptocarnivore205]

You mentioned a community around the application Cheat that would have other scripts. Could you provide a link to this resource? Please.

[@adre2194]

Emotional life-changing video

[@r66fplaysgames]

There is also a GUI for FFMpeg called WinFF.

[@XyQrTw]

You can also use hardlink to rename commands like Cheat , this keep your old file and does not take up space .

[@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG]

For the record, I never stare, nod knowingly and smile while sitting in front of a computer.

[@benbou]

Let archive this video with YT-DLP, it's a good one!

[@tzvischamovic372]

awesome video ty! what about spreadsheet to pdf or document or text?

[@knottytoob]

@ThioJoe Bruv thanks for putting out meaningfully applicable content. It is appreciated in kind regards.

[@lakshyarajdash]

Hi ThioJoe, I wonder that where's the BIOS of the system located ? Is it located in any partition of windows or directly written on to the system processor.

[@uooooooooh]

Neither, it's kept on a separate chip.

[@lakshyarajdash]

@@uooooooooh But I wonder how does the BIOS work ?

[@uooooooooh]

​@@lakshyarajdashThat's a much more complicated question, but you could always poke around with a search engine.

[@thefatrat5240]

@@lakshyarajdash well in simple terms(the only ones i know) whenever you press the power button the uefi chip turns on and then tells the CPU to turn on and then it boots the OS or the multi boot interface correct me if I'm wrong

[@annettesurfer]

YT has a free “watch later” function so I don’t see any reason to waste space downloading. As for command lines, here’s my weekly basic go-to after I’ve exhausted every possible update: CMD>Admin>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /Checkhealth CMD>Admin>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth CMD>Admin>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth Sfc /ScanNow Winget Upgrade --All Merely gleaned from the ‘net, no personal technical knowledge so redundancy is unknown. Perhaps SFC would suffice but the entire process is very quick anyway. Comments are welcome.

[@UncleJemima]

there are plenty of reasons why someone might want to download a YT video though: - to extract the audio (think music) - to clip segments - to watch without an internet connection - to preserve the file in case YT or the uploader removes it

[@annettesurfer]

@@UncleJemima I suppose people do have reasons. Thanks.

[@riiiiiiiick1111]

when using the direct link this appeared: Access denied Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked. Access Blocked Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.

[@gamereditor59ner22]

Cool! Thanks!

[@Zak_Hooi]

I normally use PDFTK for some actions on PDF files, but PDFcpu (at least under WSL) is much faster and can remove the password protection that interferes with splitting / rearranging pages.

[@RonakDhakan]

If you need another command line tool to help you remember all the commands for other command line tools, that means somebody should just make a GUI program instead. I use command line only if I have to.

[@uooooooooh]

GUIs are far less flexible, less compatible, and slower than even searching man pages for what you want, let alone compared to a program that spits out your commonly used arguments for you (although at that point, why not just make a wrapper?).

[@stephenluttrell8958]

You can’t use GUIs with scripts, and for some of us, the command line is indispensable. I am blind and it’s a crapshoot if a GUI will be accessible to me-especially if it’s open source and made by normies who don’t care about a11y.

[@jovetj]

I always have a Command Prompt open because I use it so much. Fastest way to filter files and often just to get things done. I even made my own DIR replacement.

[@protogen_1414]

Is there a way to print a string into cmd so I only have to edit the Filenames? So the command is pre-filled when starting a .batch but with the ffmpeg command I use mostl

[@Conqueror-of-Demons]

I definitely expected Aria2c and Chocolatey to be mentioned in this video but I was surprised to not find it.

[@vikferreira2137]

How to bypass device security issues when trying to run older software executables, on Win 11 os. Logitech gaming software drivers.

[@flo4650]

The chichi's trick is pretty useful.

[@Pawlo370]

czy pobieranie filmów z youtube nie jest nielegalne?

[@Joooooooooooosh]

Cheat reminded me of something I recently made for Powershell. It's a keyboard shortcut that lets you input a brief description of what you want to do, then it calls GPT4 API to find out the command or short code block to get it done, and replaces the input buffer with that command. I doubt it will let me link to it in comments though. 😐

[@mad-gamer38]

Can you maybe look into doing a video on Aria2C? It's a command line-based download utility.

[@uooooooooh]

It's not totally CLI, but I couldn't live without mpv and its command-line options anymore for playing media.

[@d9zirable]

1:14 cbat?

[@artratengo]

😂lmao yeah

[@nicolasdesenvolvedor1642]

C dot bat cause yes

[@danilotoza3044]

How do i download cheat

[@RockyAllenLane]

err.exe justs opens and closes a DOS window. Not able to enter an error code.

[@ThioJoe]

You have to run it from within the command prompt window, not double clicking it

[@Aaqil_3D]

Hi, Could you please add a KZbin subtitle download to your YT-DLP PowerShell Script?

[@fizixx]

I've used one or two of these, but not heard of the others.

[@pixelpuppy]

does anyone know of a pdf to epub converter that does proper OCR text conversion?

[@trp225]

How do I get the tools? Please and thank you

[@uooooooooh]

They are linked in the description. I imagine most are available through winget as well.

[@JaySee5]

1:22 this needs a more detailed description or its own video. The Windows documentation for cheat is terrible. You also have to rename the file to cheat.exe. The cheat "folder" is in %appdata%\cheat which is very difficult to find to must novice users. The "personal" folder is not created on initial run either. You have to manually create it. Cheat also doesn't add itself to PATH so you have to do that manually to. It's a general pain in the butt to get setup and working for a novice.

[@jovetj]

That's why I made my own folder which is first in my PATH and it gets all the command line programs I'd ever want to use.

[@GogoTheSomeone]

I like croc a lot. Just plain useful

[@danbromberg]

For those Windows users who had as much difficulty installing CHEAT as I did, installing with Chocolatey couldn't have been any easier! Possibly winget would've worked as well.

[@budgye]

No matter how many different ways I try I still keep getting "is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file" when I run the cheat.bat file. ???

[@grogroge]

next suggestion: add some of these cmd to context menu , pyWinContext, Easy Context Menu, to name a few , are great tools...

[@pcc404]

imagemagick also has a GUI (on linux at least)

[@bkThund3r]

Can ytdl plus download videos from Netflix, tubi, etc?

[@uooooooooh]

According to the supported sites list in their github link, yes Tubi, no Netflix.

[@yassinehani]

no cause some sites encrypt the video stream

[@sootguy]

hyperfine not needed there is powershell command does the same without installing anything . its Measure-Command

[@atenleggedninja]

Roast me if you must, but I can't get the syntax right to have your YT-DLP script to work on my machine. I've screwed with path syntax for my yt-dlp and ffmpeg installs. Any help would be appreciated. If it matters, I used Chocolatey for both.

[@ThioJoe]

Hm try putting all three files (script, ffmpeg.exe, and yt-dlp) in the same folder

[@atenleggedninja]

@@ThioJoe yep, did that. I know it is simply not putting the right path syntax in your script. I've tried several ways that seem to make sense, but alas no dice. A sample of the pathway syntax lines in your script would be most helpful.

[@Unknown-sv9fm]

How do i install cheat on Windows

[@PhanorColl]

great list of tool.

[@thefatrat5240]

You forget the Microsoft sysinternals suite well done are gui thought

[@vfeuer9236]

this is like rule 34 for commands, if there's an idea of tool, it will be a command to do that

[@Chalisque]

In the case of pandoc, on Linux*, this two-liner allows you to view a markdown file in the browser: #!/bin/bash A="$(mktemp --suffix=.html)" pandoc --quiet -f markdown_phpextra -t html -s "$@" >| "$A" && google-chrome "$A" and with the addition of two simple lines, so that the first parameter is the file type, we can write a viewer for any filetype that pandoc can read: #!/bin/bash L="$1" shift A="$(mktemp --suffix=.html)" pandoc --quiet -f "$L" -t html -s "$@" >| "$A" && google-chrome "$A" * I say on Linux. This is easy adapted to macos as the script will run essentially identically under zsh. Under Windows, this could be rewritten as an equally simple Powershell script.

[@pavelprchal8625]

Cheat is what i missed soo long!

[@masterloquendo1995]

What a great video. Helps a lot, thank you.

[@m.r6870]

How you can open . CNC files

[@AslamNazeerShaikh]

Please cover networking tools.. like... ftp file transfer from cmd..

[@brxxxi]

Dear ThioJoe, 4:03 moment of the clip..... First of all I want to thank you for PS script in order to use thisdownload tool. I have a sugesstion on your script I don't know is that possible, but I think you shoud put the ability to download more then one url at once.... script first coud ask user how many videos want to download and then through implementation of FOR loop, user shoud be able to put 1st link, then 2nd etc and after loop is complete it need to ask about video format yours options "1 or 2" and then tool coud download one by one..... And now I want to tell you something about downloading audio only.... I personally perefer more tradicional mp3 format, but when I choose option 5 in your script it only gives me m4u or mp4 with only audio on it. Did you know that is actually possible to extract mp3 audio through those args on EXE file "-x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 5 yt url", but this is only applyable in classic cmd not in power shell envaremant. Can you please be so kind, to implement for loop into yours PS script and try to write bash script for extracting audio to classic mp3 file.... Best regrads!

[@arekusoo]

I dont usually write comments but thanks for your videos