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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Yes, those are easier with CLI, but they are no way a task that you do as common as the simple dir navigation and file copying that I described.
Often when you're copying some files within a dir, they don't have a pattern. If the filename starts with something similar, then they're group together in Explorer anyway.
Along with the ability of grouping files by modified date/type/size/duration/dimension, it can do most of the sorting that you'll ever need most of the time, that using regex won't be any faster. Sure, when the need for regex comes, it's faster, but that doesn't happen that often.
Again, simple moving/copying files from one dir to another is way more common than renaming a perfectly good GIF file to a .jpg extension.
So, no doubt when doing slightly obscure tasks like the one you mentioned, CLI is better, I never disagreed with that, but a person's computing experience largely consists of pretty standard tasks.