Tools with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be easy to learn. All of their commands and options are typically laid out on menus and dialog boxes, making it easy to discover what the tool can do. If “easy” and “intuitive” are your main criteria for programs, then a GUI tool may always be the right choice.
Tools with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be easy to learn. All of their commands and options are typically laid out on menus and dialog boxes, making it easy to discover what the tool can do. If “easy” and “intuitive” are your main criteria for programs, then a GUI tool may always be the right choice.
But the simplicity of GUI interfaces can also make them weak and inflexible. For instance, imagine that you’re a programmer and you’re cleaning out your Linux filesystem. You’d like to find object files that haven’t been accessed in six months or more, all through your filesystem, and run make clean in those directories. Can a graphical filesystem browser do that in one step? Probably not. However, the power of the many non-GUI Linux utility programs, joining forces through the shell, would let you make quick work of that job.
Let’s look at some powerful things you can do on a command-line. Even if you don’t want to do exactly these things, you’re likely to get some ideas for related uses. This “related-ness” ability of the shell and its command-line — letting you combine tools to do just what you need to do — is the very spirit of “Power Tools.”
Faster than Emacs and vi
If you make a mistake on the command line, how can you fix it? Most modern shells let you recall and change previous command lines by pressing the up-arrow key (or CONTROL-p or…
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