Unix commands that feel like cheating — and why most devs have never heard of them

You know grep , sed , awk . You've read the same "10 useful terminal commands" articles written since 2009. This isn't that. These are the commands that change how you think about the terminal — the ones that make a task you'd normally open Python for take 8 seconds instead. Command 01 — pv : pipe viewer, or "why is this taking forever?" "I was copying a 40GB database dump over SSH. Zero feedback. Just a blinking cursor for 25 minutes. I had no idea if it was stuck, slow, or done. I killed it tw