Published at LXer:

You may consider this article as somewhat of a "part two" of the article I wrote a few days ago. It's all about going step-by-step to get you, the user, proficient at the command-line and become envy material for your friends. The distribution chosen for this is Ubuntu, but these commands that are about to be exposed will work on any other Linux system you might encounter, and you will be warned when there are exceptions. What you will get is a how-to about how to accomplish various tasks using the command-line. And one of the advantages is that you can use these commands regardless of desktop environment or lack thereof. You are only required to have a minimal Linux knowledge base for this article, so get to your terminals and let's start.

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Why would you want to do this on the command line ? Wifi on the command line is one of the most tedious and problematic tasks. I would use a GUI program for this.

The main advantages of CLI over GUI are:
1) ability to automate
2) ability to run a command on a batch of files at once
3) greater stability and reliability (mostly because CLI programs are simpler and do only one thing well)

Personally, I would learn how to simplify my life by using the CLI, not complicate it. Setting up wifi via command line is a complicated task that is made much easier by a GUI. Of course, there are also wrapper scripts that can allow you to set it up with just one command, which I would also use instead of this.