Linked by Greg Afinogenov on Wed 3rd Sep 2003 07:19 UTC
It is not fashionable nowadays to speak of the merits of the command line, in an age where things like streaming video and Aqua are an integral part of our daily life. However, I do not think that typed-in commands must necessarily be consigned to the dustbin of computer history. Of course, I am not suggesting that we all drop X and Windows and pretend like we are living in the early eighties. The command line interface still has much to offer us, and many of its benefits simply cannot physically be emulated or even replaced by graphical ones.
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>The world of the Unix console, as opposed to its desktop, is rather unfragmented.
Yes the "same" commands exists everywhere, but they have usually different option or different corner cases, fortunately the GNU version of these tools are available everywhere, but still.
The options are unfortunately very different: you want to have the version number, is-it -V, -v, --version or even something else?
The help files are in which format: man pages, info pages (beurk), HTML files, etc..
Are you tried to parse a simple ps output? It is quite complicated!
The text format used by the pipe has a main advantage that it is simple, but it also means that you have to continue reparse the output of the commands.
I'm wondering if a ruby terminal could be interesting, where you have the direct equivalent of each normal command: ls, ps, etc and each command would have a special options to be able to chain more easily the commands: ps --ruby would output a hash table, which could be easily used after.
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