(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Just making this thread to post about some great CLI programs, they're often superseded by their GUI counterparts, even though they honestly don't need to be used in a GUI, and in doing so more RAM and processing power is used.

Well regardless, here's the programs I came to post about if you don't already know about them.

First off is htop, this is a great program to monitor and administrate the running tasks. It's often superseded by gnome-system-monitor. It uses ncurses so even though it's a command line program it can be still colourful and look decent, it's also very simple to use as it uses the function keys for most tasks.

Screenshot:
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It's included in most distribution official repositories, so it's easy to obtain.

Ubuntu/Debian/.deb distro users can simple run 'apt-get install htop' to obtain it.

On Fedora/YUM package manager users can simple run 'yum install htop'

There are downloads for source code and more information located here - You must login or register to view this content.

Next up is mpg123, this is a great application for playing MP1/MP2/MP3 files, it's incredibly simple and lightweight, all you have to do is put in 'mpg123 (filename)' to play the file, but it still gives extensive amounts of command line flags for playing back your files how you want.
It's also great because you can easily create a playlist of your entire music collection by changing directory to your music directory then putting in 'find ./* -name "*.mp3"|sed 's/\.\///;'|sort>List.lst' which will locate all MP3 files and put them into a file called List.lst, then whenever you want to play your music you can do 'mpg123 --list List.lst'

Another great thing about mpg123 is unlike GUI applications if you shut down your X server mpg123 will still be playing, but if you were using a GUI app it would close.

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mpg123 is hosted on You must login or register to view this content. and is also in many linux distributions repositories.

The last app is mc (Midnight Commander) a CLI file manager that also uses ncurses so it can be extremely usable and look decent at the same time.
It also has a bash shell at the bottom which is extremely useful.

Screenshot:
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More information is available at You must login or register to view this content. and just like the other apps it's available in most distro repositories.