10 useful commandline utilities for FreeBSD

Posted on July 1, 2011 by UmasK

Here’s a list of useful commandline utilities for FreeBSD. For all you admins out there…

MTR

MTR is a traceroute…sort of. It uses ping packets though, not the standard traceroute icmp packets (configurable)

 

SCREEN

Screen keeps your terminal session intact…even when you have disconnected.

 

MULTITAIL

Multitail lets you tail multiple logfiles at the same time. Very handy.

 

IOZONE

Iozone is an I/O benchmarking tool.

 

IFTOP

iftop shows you your current connections realtime.

 

TRAFSHOW

An alternative to iftop. Does the same thing.

 

CURL

Curl is a http toolbox. Very useful.

 

RSYNC

rsync synchronizes files and directories securely (over SSH).

 

SLURM

Slurm is a network traffic visualizer. Very handy.

 

HTOP

And last, but definitively not least, htop. htop is an alternative to the original top command.

Some of these tools need to be installed through ports.

Cheers !

Rick

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About UmasK

Rick is a typical UNIX & Linux geek. He is specialised in hands-on UNIX and Windows system administration, maintenance, scripting, setting up servers, maintaining servers, 3rd line support for UNIX (and Windows), setting up new services and new implementations, migrations. Research and Development, internet (hosting). Rick works as a freelancer / contractor through his own company, Mitranet.
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15 Responses to 10 useful commandline utilities for FreeBSD

  1. MarkPowell says:
    July 1, 2011 at 17:55

    For all you FreeBSD admins out there…
    Which must be both of you, or perhaps all three…
    ;-)

  2. Vl. says:
    July 25, 2011 at 17:45

    It is certainly useful tools, but it should be noted that they are not part of the base FreeBSD.
    Thank you.

  3. Vicente says:
    July 31, 2011 at 09:16

    Why not 11 commands? atacontrol must have apear!
    Cheers.

  4. JimBlogger says:
    August 9, 2011 at 13:50

    Wow this is a cool program. I never really did like the old tracert programs. This one is way more accurate IMO. Probablem is, what if a router has the ping service turned off?

    • UmasK says:
      August 9, 2011 at 14:55

      Assuming you are speaking about mtr, mtr does have the option to send UDP datagrams instead of ICMP ECHO’s. See the man page for that…

      Cheers,

      Rick

  5. Steven Friedrich says:
    August 25, 2011 at 15:24

    Thanks for the post, but I wish you would have indicated in the text which are ports. “screen” has been part of BSD for decades.

  6. Tarek says:
    August 26, 2011 at 02:28

    I read on some websites recently that htop behaves strangely on FreeBSD, it gives wrong stats compared with the top utility that comes preinstalled, because BSD’s differ under the hood from Linux systems, here is a link:

    http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=10352

  7. Rafael Lopes says:
    January 21, 2012 at 04:06

    Came to this post via LinkedIn topic on FreeBSD group.
    Congratulations for your blog! It’s very handy. I will follow the rss right now =)
    Thank you for sharing your BSD knowledge.

    Cheers from Brazil :)

  8. Alex.V says:
    January 27, 2013 at 06:54

    No “tmux” ?
    I bet if you will start using it instead of old GNU’s “screen” you will delete “screen” from this list :)

    I found also that “IOZONE” show incorrect results on BSD based OS’s.
    FreeBSD include in the base nice utility “diskinfo” that show more realistic data.