"One of the most novel and differentiating features of a UNIX system is its command line. With just a few keystrokes, including a bit of 'glue', you can use the command line to combine a finite set of UNIX utilities into innumerable, impromptu data transforms."
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Member since:
2005-07-09
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It's got a name, "SHELL", and nobody has changed it. It may use command line interface like a million other programs but it has a name and it sure aint, "the command line". Lusers type at a command line, UNIX users work at a SHELL prompt and anybody who doesn't know the difference shouldn't be allowed near one.
The shell may be even older than you and deserves a little respect.
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Of course, this is ignoring the fact that for many the shell is the default environment for the command line. Wouldn't you satisfy your anal retentiveness completely just by harassing people to identify *which* shell they're working in? Referring to the shell says as little as calling it the command line.
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2005-12-21
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"The shell may be even older than you and deserves a little respect."
Ahh so it's anal retentive day huh? Well I can go even further.
The shell is little more than the interface to the command line, which allows me to feed my selected instructions to the tool which is undoubtedly your senior. Yes, the terminal is what really deseves our reverence. That's it, bow to the vt100 n00b.
Member since:
2005-07-18
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It wasn't but five years ago that I realized I had a misconception about the command line.
Back in the late 80's the company I worked for had less PCs than workers, so they were community resources. But I was possessive of the one I used, so I never walked away from it with a DOS window exposed.
Why? Because I viewed the DOS command line as a grant of full access to the full power of the PC. You could run any command, see all the files in any directory, create new software, and do anything the PC could do. Instead, I left either my DOS menu or later the Windows click-and-wait interface (GUI) exposed for lesser experienced workers to deal with. I progressed from DOS to 4DOS to Cygwin/bash (now Linux/bash) and experienced ever more power and speed as I grew in skill using of the superior interface.
But five or six years ago I was shocked to realize that not one coworker viewed the click-and-wait interface with any disdain at all. So there I was, conscientiously hiding shell windows from view out of long habit before walking out of my office, when I might have come closer to the intended affect by expanding a shell to full screen.
This article has such basic stuff that I wasn't even going to comment on it, but in retrospect, I think an awful lot of people are captured by the eye candy of the GUI and miss out on the true power of the PC. So I went the extra step of even recommending it.
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2005-07-09
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I kneel before it enough, (back chair). While I have witnessed many arguments over their superior features I personally feel c, korn, bourne, reborn, z are all pretty much functionally equivalent.
It's not a bad article, very superficial but it hits quite a few bases for a one pager. The headline just gave me the feeling of implied connotation that there is some relation or equivalency of shell scripting/programming architecture to the, "command/cmd" line of other systems that bugged me. The gui is their shell. Will the rise of the linux gui desktop eventually kill the shell?
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As much as shell is powerfull as much as its complex and not easy to learn even admitted by the best geniuses and Unix/Linux Teachers. Our Brains are exploding by the amount of syntax we must learn from different command programs; there are a horrible amount of command, switches, variables, options we need to master to do simple tasks we could do with GUI.
Maybe, 10 well written GUI windows will be sufficient for us to administer our systems, and will relief the administrators from knowing programmer's stuff.
Unix/Linux administators feel lost if they don't have good knowledge of programming to be able to solve some problems even not related to programming.
So, maybe one day, an excellent, powerful GUI will be standard on Unix/Linux and will make us visit our konsoles only in case of emergencies.
Programmers should be execluded from engoying GUI, they must learn all codes and syntaxes and live in konsoles till they die..Just kidding!!
