Unloved utilities

[Toby Burress]

I've noticed, in help channels and elsewhere, that there are a lot of great utilities in the base system, and some in ports, that are excellent and useful and almost totally unknown by newbies.  Even when they are known, they are often not used well.  Examples are find(1), bc(1), misc/screen, vi(1), dd(1), pw(1), etc.  In fact nearly all two-letter binaries are absurdly powerful and underused.

Now, raising awareness of these utilites is not difficult, but even when people are aware of them, they rarely want to wade through the manpages to see the specific solution to their problem.  The pw manpage is a great way to intimidate people.  So even when people know what they are and what they do, they don't know how to use them properly.  For example, many people are familiar enough with screen to do screen -r and ^a^d and that's it.

I was thinking of writing an article or a book describing several excellent but arcane binaries.  My questions are, whether this would be worthwhile as its own project, or should it be subsumed under an existing article/book, or would I be better off not publishing this as a doc project; whether anyone has any other very popular but often-underused utilities they would like to see written up; and whether anyone would like to be in on this project.

(apologies (again) if this turns out to be a double post.  Mailer trouble.)