On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 12:17:38AM +1130, Mike Andrew wrote: >On Mon, 4 Feb 2002 15:41, Burns MacDonald wrote: > >> frontal lobotomy can produce a Windows OS clone. > >You're opinion is always worth respecting Burns but that's a cheap throway >shot at explaining away the need to make an OS user friendly. A killer line >to knock out opposition. (anyway, it takes a real idiot to create 10million >lines of code and call it Windows, a lobotomy would have reduced the line >count) The arcane blitheringly stupid cli syntax of Linux can get consigned >to the dustbin where it deserved to be 20 years ago. The cli is an >embarassment to those who use it...
Bovine defacation! Doug Gwyn put it best when he said ``GUIs make simple things simple, and complex things impossible''. I'm not saying that GUIs aren't useful for many things, and I certainly would find life a lot harder without them. On the other hand, there are many things I can do much more easily and quickly from the command line than I can poking through endless menus and screens to accomplish the same thing. It's a lot easier to copy all the text files in a directory to a floppy by typing ``cp *.txt /auto/floppy'' than it is to select them with a GUI, right-click copy, go find the floppy in another file manager, then right-click paste. How many times have you been selecting files from a dialog box with ctrl-leftclick, only to let up on the ctrl key, and loose all the ones you had selected? Some applications are by nature GUI. GUIs make the infrequently performed system administration jobs more convenient. GUIs make it extremely difficult if not impossible to automate jobs. The best GUI administration tools are basically front ends for command line programs, and either display or log the commands they execute so that jobs that are done frequently can be repeated very quickly by putting those commands in a script. As an example of this, I frequently have to burn CDs containing all the vendor updates for a system along with all of the software we've written for installations, and the directory this is in has gotten too large to fit on a single CDrom so I have to exclude some files and directories. I did this with xcdroast, tweaking patterns until I got it right, then put the commands it used to make the ISO file system, burn, and verify the CD into a short script that I can now execute from the command line in less time than it takes to get xcdroast past the initial greeting screen (less people time, not the time to actually do the processing). Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. -- R.A. Heinlein _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
