This is a list of Plan 9 programs. Many of these programs are very similar to the UNIX programs with the same name, others are to be found only on Plan 9. Others again share only the name, but have a different behaviour.
System software
General user
dd – convert and copy a file
date – date and time
echo – print arguments
file – determine file type
ns – display namespace
plumb – send message to plumber
plumber – interprocess messaging
rc – rc is the Plan 9 shell
rio – the new Plan 9 windowing system
8½ – the old Plan 9 windowing system
uptime – show how long the system has been running
System management
Processes and tasks management
time – time a command
kill, slay, broke – print commands to kill processes
sleep – suspend execution for an interval
ps – process status
psu – process status information about processes started by a specific user
User management and support
passwd, netkey, iam – change user password
who – who is using the machine
man, lookman – print or find pages of this manual
File system and server
/boot/boot – connect to the root file server
fossil/fossil, fossil/flchk, fossil/flfmt, fossil/conf, fossil/last – archival file server history – print file names from the dump users – file server user list format vac – create a vac archive on Venti venti/buildindex, venti/checkarenas, venti/checkindex, venti/conf, venti/copy, venti/fmtarenas, venti/fmtindex, venti/fmtisect, venti/rdarena, venti/rdarenablocks, venti/read, venti/wrarenablocks, venti/write – Venti maintenance and debugging commands venti/venti, venti/sync – an archival block storage server yesterday, diffy – print file names from the dump
Hardware devices
setrtc – set real time clock (RTC) on PC hardware
Files and text
Filesystem utilities
chgrp – change file group
chmod – change mode
cp, fcp, mv – copy, move files
du – disk usage
ls, lc – list contents of directory
mkdir – make a directory
bind, mount, umount – change name space
pwd, pbd – working directory
rm – remove files
touch – set modification date of a file
Archivers and compression
ar – archive and library maintainer
gzip, gunzip, bzip2, bunzip2, compress, uncompress, zip, unzip – compress and expand data tar – archiver
Text processing
awk – pattern-directed scanning and processing language
cat, read – catenate files
cmp – compare two files
diff – differential file comparator
doc2txt, xls2txt – extract printable strings from Microsoft Office documents
doctype – intuit command line for formatting a document
fmt, htmlfmt – simple text formatters
freq – print histogram of character frequencies
grep – search a file for a pattern
idiff – interactive diff
mc – multicolumn print
p – paginate
pr – print file
sed – stream editor
spell, sprog – find spelling errors
split – split a file into pieces
tail – deliver the last part of a file
tcs – translate character sets
tr – translate characters
wc – word count
xd – hex, octal, decimal or ASCII dump of file
Editors
acme – interactive text editor and shell
ed – text editor
sam – screen editor with structural regular expressions
Communication, networking and remote access
con, telnet, rx, xms, xmr – remote login, execution, and XMODEM file transfer
cpu – connection to CPU server
dial/at, dial/drain, dial/expect, dial/pass – dialer scripting tools
netstat – summarize network connections
replica/changes, replica/pull, replica/push, replica/scan – client–server replica management ssh, sshnet, scp, aux/sshserve – secure login and file copy from/to Unix or Plan 9 tel, iwhois – look in phone book vncs, vncv – remote frame buffer server and viewer for Virtual Network Computing (VNC)