Two miracle utilities: rlwrap and screen

Two miracle utilities: rlwrap and screen.

rlwrap

Ever wish you had nice command-line editing like BASH but the tool you are using is hopeless? rlwrap is the tool for the job: it is a readline wrapper for any program that reads from stdin. A classic use case is wrapping sqlplus.

screen

Say you have an on-again, off-again shell session you come back to throughout the day. You could keep a shell window open all day. But what if you change machines, say from a laptop to a desktop and back again? screen is the tool for the job: it is a full-screen window manager for terminal sessions. Disconnect from the current session, keep screen running in the background, and reconnect later at your convience. Nothing is lost.