On the Smashing Magazine site today they've posted a list of powerful CLI tools that every developer should at least know about to help make their lives easier - six of them ranging from SSH tunnels to HTTP testing.

Good tools are invaluable in figuring out where problems lie, and can also help to prevent problems from occurring in the first place, or just help you to be more efficient in general. Command line tools are particularly useful because they lend themselves well to automation and scripting, where they can be combined and reused in all sorts of different ways. Here we cover six particularly powerful and versatile tools which can help make your life a little bit easier.

The tools they mention are all things you'd install on a unix-based system:

• Curl
• Ngrep (network packet searching)
• Netcat (to work with network connections)
• Sshuttle (SSH tunneling)
• Siege (HTTP benchmarking)
• Mitmproxy (capturing proxy, both HTTP and HTTPS)