LifeHacker.com Top 10 Command-line Tools

We love top 10 lists. They require a very short attention span, and the countdown angle feeds our need for drama. David Letterman turned top 10 lists into a very lucrative career. I'm surprised politicians don't use top 10 lists more often. The candidates can understand them (unless they can't count to 10), and reading them builds to a melodramatic finish.

So when I see a top 10 list in one of my RSS feeds, I usually stop and look. Most of them turn out to be stupid, such as the "Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth," (yes, it's an actual top 10 list, complete with snap shots). There's even a website dedicated to top 10 lists.

But every once in a while, I see something useful, like the "Top 10 Command Line Tools" from LifeHacker. LifeHacker.com is a daily blog that features "tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently," according to the website's about page.

Now I'm not an IT administrator or a programmer, so I don't venture near a command line very often, but even I could understand the tools profiled on the Lifehacker list, and I thought they looked helpful. However, the list is somewhat deceptive. There's actually only nine command-line tools. Number 10, the first one on the web page, is a link to another blog post about customizing your command-line prompt (does that make it "C:DOSblingbling.bat?").

I'm sure you'll let me know if these so-called top 10 command-line tools are old and useless, which sounds a lot like most politicians.