This is a list of Unix programs. Some of these programs are standard utilities that will be found on any Unix or Unix-like operating system; indeed a system without such basic components as ls or sh could scarcely be described as truly Unix-like. Others are more special-purpose and may not be installed by default. Finally, some items on this list are simply separate applications which happen to have been written for Unix.

Many MS-DOS commands are similar to, or based on these commands. See List of DOS commands for more information.

System software

System Management

• admin – Administer SCCS files
• fuser (Unix) – Identify processes by files or sockets
• mesg – Control write access to your terminal
• newgrp – Log in to a new group
• nohup – Run a command with immunity to hangups outputting to non–tty
• pathchk – Check the validity/portability of filenames
• logger – Make entries in the system log
• sh – The Bourne shell, the standard Unix shell
• dd – Disk Dump
• dirname – Strip non–directory suffixes from a path
• echo – Print to standard output
• env – Show or change environment variables
• file (or stat )– Determine the type of a file
• strip – Discard symbols from object files
• uptime – Print how long the system has been running

Kernel specific

• ipcs – Provide information on IPC facilities
• ipcrm – Remove a message queue, semaphore set or shared memory id
• date – Print or set the system date and/or time
• uname – Print assorted system statistics

Processes and tasks management

• nice – Alter priorities for processes
• time – Time a command
• top – Produce a dynamic list of all resident processes
• wait – Wait for the specified process
• renice – Alter the priorities of an already running process
• return – Return a value
• chroot – Change the system root directory for all child processes
• timex – time process shell execution, measure process data and system activity
• kill – Send a signal to process, or terminate a process (by PID)
• killall – Terminate all processes (in Linux, it's kill by name)
• crontab – Crontab file editor
• at – Single–time command scheduler
• cron – Periodic command scheduler
• daemonic – Interface to daemon init scripts
• sleep – Delay for specified time
• ps – Report process status
• anacron – Periodic command scheduler

User management and support

• su – Start a new process (defaults to shell) as a different user (defaults to root)
• logname – Print user's login name
• passwd – User and group entries for daemons
• write – Send a message to another user
• who – Show who is logged on
• id – Print real/effective UIDs/GIDs
• man – Manual browser
• locale – Get locale specific information
• localedef – Compile locale definitions

Terminal configuration

• stty – Change and print terminal line settings
• tty – Print filename of terminal connected to standard input
• tput – Initialize a terminal/query terminfo database

Files and texts

• Coreutils - gnu package, containing a lot of file, text, and shell utilities.

Filesystem Utilities

• chgrp – Change the group of a file or directory
• chmod – Change the permissions of a file or directory
• chown – Change the owner of a file or directory
• cp – Copy a file or directory to another location
• df – Report disk space
• du (Unix) – Calculate used disk space
• fsck – File System ChecK
• ln – Link one file/directory to another
• ls – List directory contents
• mkdir – Make a directory
• mkfifo – Make a named pipe
• mount – Make a volume accessible through VFS
• mv – Move/rename a file or directory
• pwd – Print the current working directory
• rm – Delete a file or directory
• rmdel
• rmdir – Delete a directory
• touch – Create a new file or update its modification time
• unlink

Archivers and compression

• afio – Compatible superset of cpio with added functionality
• ar – Maintain, modify, and extract from archives. Now largely obsoleted by tar
• bzip2 – Block–sorting file compressor
• compress – Traditional compressor using the LZW algorithm
• cpio – A traditional archiving tool/format
• gzip – The gzip file compressor
• pax – POSIX archive tool that handles multiple formats.
• tar – Tape ARchiver, concatenates files
• zcat – Prints files to stdout from gzip archives without unpacking them to separate file(s)

Text Processing

• awk – A pattern scanning and processing language
• cmp – Compare two files byte for byte
• comm – Sort two files and compare them line for line
• diff – Compare two files line by line
• expand – Convert tabs <–> spaces
• grep – Print lines matching a pattern (now largely superceded by egrep )
• merge - three way merge of files (see also paste)
• tail – Output the tail end of files
• tr – Translate characters
• uniq - remove duplicate lines from a sorted file
• wc – Word/line/byte count

Editors

• ed – Traditional line-based Unix text editor
• emacs – Powerful Lisp–based text editor and general computing environment
• ex – Text editor, often a symbolic link to vi (or vim) which causes it to run in ex emulation mode
• NEdit – The multi-purpose X11 editor
• nano – Clone of pico
• pico – PIne's message COmposition editor
• vi – Visual text editor
• vim – Vi IMproved, vi clone with syntax highlighting and many other ehancements
• XEmacs – Popular version of emacs that is derived from GNU emacs

Conversion

• iconv – Convert the encoding of the specified files
• nkf – convert Japanese characters

More unsorted

• fold – Wrap each input line to fit within the given width
• fc
• find – Search for files through a directory hierarchy
• split – Split a file into pieces
• sort – Sort lines of text files
• tsort – Perform a topological sort
• head – Output the first parts of a file
• join – Join lines of two files on a common field
• less – Improved more–like text pager
• more – Pager
• nl – Number the lines of a file
• od – Dump files in various formats, e.g. octal
• paste – Merge lines of files
• patch – Change files based on a patch file
• cut – Remove sections from each line of a file or standard input
• csplit – Split a file into sections determined by context lines
• cat – Concatenate files to standard output
• cksum – Print the CRC checksum and bytecount of a file (see also MD5)
• tac – The reverse of cat -- displays files to standard output in reverse order starting at the end of the file
• tee – Read from standard input, write to standard output and files
• uncompress
• unexpand – Convert spaces to tabs
• uudecode
• uuencode
• sed – Stream EDitor

Communication, networking and remote access

• Apache webserver
• NFS - network filesystem
• rsh, SSH, telnet - remote consoles
• samba – SMB and CIFS client and server for UNIX

Network system services

• xinetd – Replacement for inetd
• fingerd
• inetd

Network Utilities

• dhcpd
• ifconfig
• ping
• pppd

Network monitoring and security

• Ethereal
• ettercap
• John the Ripper
• Nmap
• Nessus
• tcpdump

Other

• uux
• uustat
• elm - Unix mail utility program
• mailx – Email sending utility
• talk – Talk to another logged–in user

Programming tools

Script Interpreters

• perl – Perl scripting language
• php – PHP scripting language
• Python – Python scripting language
• bash – Bourne Again SHell, standard shell and a script interpreter on linux systems

Compilers and Programming tools

• c99
• cc – C Compiler
• ctags – Generate tags file summarising location of objects in source files
• distcc – Tool for distributing compiles across multiple machines
• fort77 – Fortran 77 compiler
• gcc – GNU Compiler Collection
• lex – Lexical scanner generator
• m4 – Macro language
• make – Automate builds
• nm – List symbols from object files
• yacc – Parser generator

Scripting utilities

• expr – evaluate expressions
• false – Return a value that evaluates as False
• true – Return a value that evaluates as True
• xargs – Build and execute command lines from standard output
• basename – Returns the final component of a path
• batch
• unset
• continue – Skip the current iteration of a loop
• strings – Print strings of printable characters found in a file
• times
• test – Test an expression
• hash
• shift

User interface

X11 etc

Desktops/Graphical User Interfaces

• Blackbox – and its variants (including Fluxbox and Waimea)
• CDE – Common Desktop Environment, Most commonly found on proprietary UNIX systems
• Enlightenment
• Fvwm and its variant Fvwm95, which has been modified to behave like Windows 95
• GNOME – GNU Network Object Model Environment
• IceWM – ICE Window Manager
• KDE – K Desktop Environment
• Aqua – Apple's GUI interface for the Darwin BSD based operating system Mac OS X
• Window Maker
• WMI – Window Manager Improved
• XFce

Shells

• bash – Bourne Again SHell, standard shell on linux systems
• csh – C shell
• ksh – Korn shell, standard shell on most proprietary Unix systems
• tcsh – TENEX C shell, standard shell on BSD systems
• zsh – Z shell

Computer security

Antivirus

• ClamAV email virus scanner

Cryptography

• Enigmail – Graphical interface to gpg for Mozilla and Mozilla Thunderbird
• gpg – GNU Privacy Guard, a complete and free replacement for PGP (to do file and email encryption and signature)
• openssl – Secure Sockets Layer and general crypto library
• pinepgp – Filters which enable pine to use signed/encrypted email

Linux specific programs

• apt – Front–end for dpkg or rpm
• debconf – Debian package configuration management system
• drakconf – Frond–end configuration utility for Mandrake Linux
• dpkg – The Debian package manager
• emerge – A frontend to portage
• fink – The Fink package manager
• rpm – Originally the package manager for Red Hat Linux, now used by several distributions including Mandrake Linux
• portage – The Gentoo Linux package manager
• urpmi – Front–end to rpm, used by Mandrake Linux

Application software

Office software

• OpenOffice.org
• KOffice

Multimedia

• Audacity – Sound recording and editing program
• GIMP – Powerful image manipulation package
• GStreamer – Plugin-based multimedia framework
• ImageMagick – Image conversion library
• mpg123 – MP3 player
• MPlayer – Movie player
• Rosegarden – Powerful digital audio workstation
• sox – sound conversion tool
• totem – Movie player
• transcode – Flexible command-line media encoding tool
• xine – Video Player
• xmms – Winamp like multimedia player

Web browsers

• Dillo – Extremely light–weight web browser
• Galeon – Light–weight old GNOME web browser
• Epiphany – Light–weight GNOME web browser
• Konqueror – KDE web browser
• Links – Console based web browser
• ELinks – Enhanced links
• lynx – Console based web browser
• Mozilla – Graphical cross platform web browser & email client
• Mozilla Firefox – Extensible Web browser from Mozilla
• Mozilla Thunderbird – Extensible Email client from Mozilla
• Opera – Web browser and e-mail client

Desktop Publishing

• Groff – Traditional typesetting system
• LaTeX – Popular TeX macro package for higher–level typesetting
• lp – Print a file (on a line printer)
• pr – Convert text files for printing
• printf – Format and print data
• Scribus
• TeX – High–quality macro–based typesetting system

Databases

• DB2
• Firebird
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• Progress (DBMS) [1]
• SQLite
• Sybase

Mathematical and scientific software

• maxima – Symbol manipulation program
• units – Unit conversion program

Desktop utilities

• dc – reverse-Polish desk calculator which supports unlimited precision arithmetic
• fortune – Fortune cookie program that prints a random quote
• bc – an arbitrary precision calculator language with syntax similar to the C programming language.
• cal – Displays a calendar

See also

• List of GNU packages
• List of open source software packages