# Most valuable tools in FreeBSD



## Hanky-panky (Jan 27, 2014)

I open this post to learn myself which tool is  your favourite in your daily use of FreeBSD.

Mine is `pkg_libchk`.

It save me hours of boring rebuilding packages when same lib version is bumped and you need to recompile all the packages depending on it, but something really need to be rebuilt.

What's yours?


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 27, 2014)

Hanky-panky said:
			
		

> Whats yours?



`ls`
It helps me see where I'm going.


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## ShelLuser (Jan 27, 2014)

Although I tend to agree with @OJ (<G>) there are actually a few commands which I heavily favour. When confining myself to the base system (so really a "FreeBSD tool") then I'd have to say ktrace (and the accompanying kdump) as well as ldd and perhaps combined with truss (I always keep forgetting about that one).

On Linux it's all about strace. I just discovered that this program is even available for FreeBSD through the devel/strace port. Even so, I personally favour both ktrace and optionally truss because whenever some program is acting up the combination of these tools allow you to carefully examine what a program is actually doing. And the best part is that you don't even have to be a C or C++ hacker to get a good impression as to what is going on.

Same can be said about ldd. You mentioned checking for libraries, personally I think a better approach is not using the package manager but to "dissect" the binaries you're working with instead.


Next, when talking about a tool outside the base system, but still related to FreeBSD management, then my vote would go out for ports-mgmt/portmaster. That critter has saved me a _lot_ of time in the past year whenever I had to deal with problems with the port collection (ranging from some inconsistencies right down to having to recompile a library and all the programs which depend on it). A few commandline parameters to portmaster and it'll take care of the rest.

Invaluable in my opinion.


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## throAU (Jan 28, 2014)

Other than the obvious...

systat is very useful, in particular for getting info on disk IO stats (amongst other things) in real time.


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## nanotek (Jan 28, 2014)

Jails.


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## SirDice (Jan 28, 2014)

I love tcpdump(1). No self-respecting network engineer can do without.


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## graudeejs (Jan 28, 2014)

/boot/kernel  It helps doing whatever I want


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## kpa (Jan 28, 2014)

The whole PF firewall suite, it's what keeps me using FreeBSD in the first place.


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## nanotek (Jan 28, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> The whole PF firewall suite, it's what keeps me using FreeBSD in the first place.



Good call. I was going to say PF, but I consider it an OpenBSD tool.


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