Ask HN: What Linux diagnostic tools/commands do you use?

I guess it depends what I'm trying to debug, but one thing that seems to be missing from your wrapper is quick logfile inspection. Tailing the last n lines of syslog (or something more specific) is often a good starting point when diagnosing problems.

Perhaps something that performs basic connectivity tests might be useful, too -- pinging the router, an external IP (like 8.8.8.8), and a FQDN (like google.com) would be a good quick test of both internal connectivity, external connectivity, and DNS resolver.

strace - to see what a program is doing / where exactly something is failing if the error message is bad

ltrace - same as above, if strace is not enough

perf trace - if you don't know the exact process to strace upfront

https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools - to track disk accesses or exec calls

env LD_DEBUG=all - debugging dynamic linker issues

Per-process I/O and network metrics are super important. I usually use pidstat (-d flag gives you I/O) for this, or read data from /proc directly.

lsof

netstat

strace

top

top, ps aux, which, find, ls, rm, cd, cat, echo, touch, pbcopy, ssh

That's pretty much it, otherwise I have a whole lot of cli tools too. Things like git, tmux, mosh, rails.. but I guess they don't count.

nc, tcpdump, ethtool, htop

Have a look on this picture which maps subsystems to tools: http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

htop, iftop, ngrep, tcpdump, lsof, strace, wireshark, nc, telnet, ping, netstat, ps, grep, awk, pv, middleman, curl, jq, mitmproxy, tail, tr....

Okay, ok pretty much all of them. :)

mostly htop, iotop, pv -d...

EDIT: ... curl, jq, cat, less, grep, awk, lynx, watch, parallel, xargs, head, tail, sqlite3, rsync, scp...