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I like this but i can't decide if it's technically abuse or not. The paste command will happily parse - (meaning read from stdin) multiple times, so for transposing a list into a table:

  file.txt:
  line1
  line2
  line3
  line4
  line5
  line6

  $ paste - - - < file.txt

  line1 line2 line3
  line4 line5 line6
Combine with the column command for pretty printing. I seem to find a use for this pretty frequently.

I like the simplicity of this one but it's not very useful day to day:

  $ echo *
As a replacement for "ls".


Back in the crusty old days, FreeBSD used to take forever to install over the network, but would start an "emergency holographic shell" on pty4. The 'echo *' trick and various other shell built-ins were very useful for exploring the system before /bin and /usr/bin are populated.




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