Which Linux tool or command is surprisingly simple, powerful, and yet underrated?"
Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I'm surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!
Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn't as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.
I used jq for something similar before, recently I've discovered Nu Shell and have been using that for converting and analyzing data since a full shell is a lot more powerful than a command (e.g. open a yaml, for each element on key X grab the first element of list Y and export to a CSV)