What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
Sometimes I talk to friends who need to use the command line, but are intimidated by it. I never really feel like I have good advice (I’ve been using the command line for too long), and so I asked some people on Mastodon:
if you just stopped being scared of the command line in the last year or three — what helped you?
This list is still a bit shorter than I would like, but I’m posting it in the hopes that I can collect some more answers. There obviously isn’t one single thing that works for everyone – different people take different paths.
I think there are three parts to getting comfortable: reducing risks, motivation and resources. I’ll start with risks, then a couple of motivations and then list some resources.
I’d add ImageMagick for image manipulation and conversion to the list. I use it to optimize jpg’s which led me to learn more about bash scripting.
GUIs are easier to learn, but they are not always available. Many services only have a CLI client. If you are connecting to a remote server or, especially, a container to debug it, it may not have a window manager installed. If you know how to do something via the CLI, you can automate it with a shell script.
But literally anything in a professional setting should be in text that can be committed and searched in a source code repository. If you can’t commit it to git, it didn’t happen.
It really depends. Maybe developing something like a game will require (almost) no CLI.
But do a little bit more server stuff, dev-ops, and you can literally not even do the job without cli.
Though in general, CLI is often better for the task, it often can easily be automated (via scripts etc.), which seems to be relevant for a lot of tasks programmers do…
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No need, GUIs are better for most tasks.
GUIs are easier to learn, but they are not always available. Many services only have a CLI client. If you are connecting to a remote server or, especially, a container to debug it, it may not have a window manager installed. If you know how to do something via the CLI, you can automate it with a shell script.
Hard disagree
They basically aren’t?
If you’re doing one-off hobbyist stuff, maybe.
But literally anything in a professional setting should be in text that can be committed and searched in a source code repository. If you can’t commit it to git, it didn’t happen.
you could document the steps required in text and add Screenshots.
That’s fine until a UI changes, or the steps to reproduce it are incomplete (or a human doesn’t follow them exactly).
Text commands are unambiguous and precise.
Logging called, they want their . log files back
I’m not sure if you’re being funny, but of course committing the output of your program isn’t what I was saying.
Sorry I literally misread your comment, let’s say I was trying to be funny lol
It really depends. Maybe developing something like a game will require (almost) no CLI.
But do a little bit more server stuff, dev-ops, and you can literally not even do the job without cli.
Though in general, CLI is often better for the task, it often can easily be automated (via scripts etc.), which seems to be relevant for a lot of tasks programmers do…