[wellylug] The importance of command line applications

Cliff Pratt enkidu at cliffp.com
Sun Jan 29 11:29:36 NZDT 2006


Steven Mulvay wrote:
 >
> Hi all, I have an opinion about the importance of command line
> applications that I'd like to share with you all to see what you
> think. I think that the usefulness and versatility of command line
> applications is starting to become under appreciated. I think it's
> sad that gui applications are being valued over command line
> applications because in many cases command line  applications can do
> just as good a job as their gui counterparts, if not better! For
> example, someone once said to me "Steven why don't you use Synaptic?
> Aptitude is old and crappy." Aptitude may be old but I don't see
> anything wrong with it. I don't need a graphics-bloated interface
> just to download and install software. In many cases my downloads
> take a long time, in these situations I often boot into run-level 3,
> (text-only mode) run aptitude and go watch TV. Then the computer can
> just sit there downloading without the unnecessary overhang of X11.
> If I need to go out in a while and intend to shutdown the computer 
> once the downloading and installation is complete then loading X11 at
> any stage would be a complete waste of resources.
>
You do know that you can kill X without rebooting? Ctrl+Alt+Backspace 
kills X. Also you can switch to text consoles by Ctrl+Alt+Fn (where n < 
7). Switch between text consoles by Alt-Fn where n < 7. Switch back to X 
by Alt-F7. Of course X doesn't get stopped.
 >
> Please don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking X11 or any of it's window
> managers, (I probably wouldn't use Linux if it did not have X11) I
> just want to make sure that development of command line applications
> continues and that the shells do not get phased out like Microsoft
> phased out DOS.
> 
Microsoft is swinging back to the command line in a big way. They have 
discovered that admining thousands of hosts can only be done from the 
command line with scripts. All major tools have a command line version 
and the latest Microsoft CLI is a proper shell.

Cheers,

Cliff

-- 

http://barzoomian.blogspot.com




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