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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>WRT the "million different and inconsitently named
>command line parameters" That is what people say when
>they don't know how to use the CLI. The truth is that you
>only need to remember 10 - 15 commands, those are the
>ones that you use all the time, for everything else there
>are man pages.
There are a few commands where I have memorized some command line options. From the top of my head: ps,ls,df,du,dd,cd,tar,mount,umount,cdrecord,mkisofs,touc,ssh,scp,less, wget
But I would like to use the CLI much more often. And in many cases the only thing that prevents me from doing so is the tedious process of looking up the relevant command line parameters in the man pages between thousands of seldom-used options. Parameter help like in modern IDEs would make this much easier.
>All I am saying is give it a chance before you knock it.
>You will be surprised.
I have been using Linux since 1995, and ms-dos before that, so I *know* how to use a CLI. But the big problem of a CLI is that the available options are not preseted to the user like in a gui. Take for example cdrecord vs. a GUI cd burn program like k3b. cdrecord is much more reliable, but to find out how to enable some special option like burn proof you have to read a huge man page or type cdrecord --help | less and read three pages of mostly useless options. This might be acceptable if you write a script that will be executed thousands of times, but for one time usage that is just not acceptable!