Re: RTFM
From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 04/18/05
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Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:35:00 -0500
In article <MYGdnRjNNaIjqPzfRVn-3g@megapath.net>, David wrote:
>Kevin Wu Won wrote:
>>
>>> The commandline is what makes computers work. When you
>>> click on an icon to run an application, you are just
>>> pressing ENTER on a command that has been typed out
>>> by someone else beforehand.
>>
>> I disagree with that, but it's irrelevant anyway.
>
>What he is saying is basically correct, even though it maybe irrelevent.
I'll agree, and it also points up the shortcoming in the GUI
>> Maybe because it's intended to be unneccessary in today's world.
The GUI can only do what the application author thought might be necessary,
and only in the way the application is set to do. Try something else, and
you're out of luck. If you want to use the computer for something other
than playing Quake or surfing pr0n sites, it really does become worth
your effort to learn what is happening.
>They are trying to make it eaiser to cross over from MS to linux. They
>are not trying to eliminate the command line at all. It is still there
>and can be used if so desired. The operator just has to be smart enough
>to know when he needs to use it. Unlike MS which really tries hard to
>complety hide it from the end user.
Another disadvantage of 'the microsoft way' is that it's incomplete. In
any breed of *nix, I can pipe the output of one command to another, and
so on (one of my "single line" scripts has 33 pipes and is 1040 characters
long) to do things that no application author would ever think is a
needed tool.
[compton ~]$ echo $HISTSIZE
1000
[compton ~]$ history | sed 's/[^|]//g' | grep -v '^$' | wc -c
680
[compton ~]$
In that shell, I'm averaging 0.7 pipes every time I hit the <Enter> key.
That's actually a bit high - it's normally about 300 per thousand. But
windoze doesn't have a 'tail', 'sed', 'tr', 'awk', 'cut', 'column' or
any one of the thousand different commands found on a dumb *nix. You
can get those commands elsewhere (well at least some of them), but the
average windoze user doesn't know why they might be useful. Instead,
they'll buy an application to parse their toy firewall log, or worse,
will download some infected freebie, and then wonder why their computer
is dialing in to some "spy" site using a connection direct through the
Nigerian Telephone Company at only six dollars a minute.
I've lost track of how many "helper" tools exist for the sole purpose of
setting up and running a dumb dialin connection to an ISP. Every desktop
seems to have one or two, each distribution adds several more, all of them
designed around the same (wrong) concept that someone saw on a late night
sci-fi movie, and all using some modem init string that no modem manufacturer
ever saw before. Do a google search for 'daemon died unexpectedly' which
is the extent of their error message. Rather helpful in a windoze sort of
way. Meanwhile, the newbie can't get help from the ISP, because they can't
spell Linux and won't support it, and the newbie comes here to Usenet and
is told to try $NAME_OF_ANOTHER_USELESS_HELPER.
Old guy
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