“Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish a sufficiently broad range of tasks.”
– Bill Garrett
A quick web search resulted in no conclusive determination as to the identity of this Bill Garrett. Nevertheless, I am simultaneously in agreement with and in awe of this succinct observation. More often than not, people (even relatively tech savvy people) will gawk in disbelief at the notion of preferring to operate in a command-line environment over its graphical counterpart. “Isn’t that like the Stone Age of computing?!”, many will exclaim. Far from it, my friends. While the *nix (UNIX and clones: GNU/Linux, BSD, etc.) command line is most certainly minimal and not immediately user-friendly, I can assure you that (at least based on observations in my brief years of experience) there are scant few tools more robust and powerful in all of Computerdom - perhaps even the world.
Don’t get me wrong, GUI (graphical user interface - think windows, desktops, and mouse-pointers, for those of you who are less-than-savvy and unfortunate enough to be reading this post) has its place. Surfing the web, playing games, watching videos, image editing - these are just a few tasks which GUI computing has revolutionized. I typically do operate in a GUI environment (albeit delightfully minimal - as close to CLI as possible: http://www.xmonad.org) However, as Mr. Garrett alludes here, there seems to be more limitation than agility when we rely on the pretty pictures to guide us through the mountains and valleys of Productivity.
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Having cut my teeth first on DOS, then later on AIX Unix then finally NetWare, I use the command line a lot. Even in the Windows universe, you can always launch CMD in order to operate in a non-GUI world.
The GUI falls short in that you can’t use switches like you can at the command prompt. Sometimes you’ll have options within the program, but that’s at the discretion of the coder.
Back in the AIX days, when I was first exposed to Unix, I remember thinking that if you could think of something you’d like to do, you could do it in AIX. That was mostly true.
I don’t use *nix much at all anymore. For the most part I live in the Windows world (still a little NetWare). It’s ok, and usually you can get the job done.
I do feel sorry for the relative newbies that don’t understand the power of the command line.
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