Has someone left the gate open again?

CLI? That's luxury, that is! Back in my day, all we had was a magnetised needle and a steady hand. If you were lucky, Pop had finished his crossword and you could use the magnifying glass.
Yeah, that's the best advice so far in this thread.

The best way to learn about the CLI is to use it.

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I had one of those. Not the 55 Baud, or even the 100 Baud, but full on 300 Baud! I used it with a VIC-20, and later with a C=64. I never got up to the 1200 Baud ones that came out later. I was on bitnet and milnet at the time. (Archie, FTP, good stuff.) After I built my own PC (overclocked 8086, 5Meg drive, 640K ram, CGA graphics, great stuff for the day) I got a 9600 baud modem on a card. The SPEED!

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In the late 80s I started with CP/M on a 64k computer.
A few years later I worked with MS-DOS on a 640k PC.
And worked with my first GUI, Sunview on SunOS, on an expensive 8MB system, CAD software on it. For system tasks I was at the # prompt in a "Shell tool". And I realized: the shell was more than a command line, it is good for automation!

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Yes, the 3 most important steps are: practice, practice and more practice.
Otherwise when I started there was no Windows and there was no X11 (but ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, ...) too.

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I can still remember my first reactions to Windows 3. A colleague had a PC in his office that ran DOS and he had put Windows on it to show us. He said it was the wave of the future. I said it would never catch on. For a start you would have to memorise what all those icons stood for and who had the time for that? It just wasn't intuitive. It was like giving up our nice simple alphabetic script to use Chinese characters instead. Also I couldn't make head or tail of how to use a mouse. The cursor just skittered all over the screen.

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The best way to learn about the CLI is to use it. << Best way to learn, Just Use It. and Just Do It. Hey Nike, you hear me.

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All this having been said, I simply agree: “Live it.” The water’s fine. “Commands” are an entirely appropriate and powerful way to approach a computer, and you’ll get the hang of “piping” in no time.

It’s important to note that any “command” can be a program, written in the language of your choice. Yes, even “PHP” can do far more than “web sites!” (Google it: “shebang.”)

Especially in the Unix/Linux environments, this is very fundamental. (And I’m amused to notice that Microsoft finally came out with what they call a “PowerShell.” Although, unsurprisingly, they did it their own way to suit their own environment.) It simply takes a little practice to quickly achieve fluency. You will then find yourself choosing(!) to use it again and again. There’s great power in that “terminal window.”

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We're all a bunch of old ....'s

Same for me, paper tape, punch cards, HP64000 boat anchor emulators atached to the Vax. No GUI until MAC and Windows became mainstream enough, and Linux desktops followed suit. Still the GUI is solely a multi window capable space so I can have multiple workflows open, all text editors and command line prompts.

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The classic Mac was unusual in that it ONLY had a GUI, and that was incredibly limiting. The best thing that ever happened to the Macintosh was Apple booting out Steve Jobs. This meant he had to develop a spiteful anti-Mac NeXT ASAP. And that meant building on top of something quickly - a Unix knockoff. NeXT wasn't the pure "my way or the highway" GUI only vision Steve Jobs had, but it was ... uhh ... better. In every way.

So, when Steve Jobs eventually returned to Apple, he brought the *nix paradigm back to the Mac. And the result was ... better.

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So ... I had not been in IT, when I got my first PC. I actually hated computers and wanted nothing to do with them. But my girlfriend claimed that she could use some training at home, as someone had asked her to use a graphic design tool on the job.

And throughout all that followed, Dos 5, Windows from 3.0 to 2000 and Linux from S.u.S.E. 5.0 to the current Debian testing rolling release... I have *still not become a maestro with the CLI*. And I would never be one.

Anyhow, my answer is that you should learn as much about anything as needed to
*) accomplish your tasks at hand
*) know some alternatives
*) know how they work, in case that you must change your routine.

This is compatible with the other advice further up in the thread. But, having been something professional in IT for a while, I must state that all is relative. You do not have to know it all.

Shoot at will.

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There is one thing required to become a "maestro" with a CLI - you need to have an unreasonable devotion to laziness.

By that, I mean that when you accomplish an annoying task you are so devoted to never doing it again that you spend WAY MORE TIME AND EFFORT figuring out how to automate it with a command line script (possibly not even a formal script - just copy/paste from a text file of notes).

This is unreasonable devotion to laziness because you're actually spending a lot of effort into not spending more effort.

A normal person will just click around in a GUI interface and just muddle through it every time. Maybe the overall effort will be more than automating the process, but 95% of the time it's not.

A "programmer" person will think, "This'll just take me five minutes to automate" oops five hours later...

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I've always been a CLI master

My first (non gaming console) computer was an 80286 IBM PC that me and my neighbor pieced together from parts he got at a flea market. It had MS-DOS 4, no networking, a 10mb disk, and one 5.25 floppy at first. There was no documentation, just "/?" after the commands to get a clue as to what they might do. I'd visit his house now and then to find if he found something new. Eventually he had Turbo Pascal, dBase 3+, and then Borland C++.

When I moved to Windows I found having to click thru everything a big hassle. To this day, the first thing I do on Windows or Mac is open a command line.

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I should add that to learn it, you have to use it. There are lots of commands, but if you learn the basics of 'getting around' the file system there aren't that many to memorize. You know cd, ls, mv, cp, rm. Then su, sudo, chgrp, chown, chmod, and passwd. That covers the most used commands. Go on from there. Now for a text editor, I wouldn't recommend vi in this day and age, I recommend something like nano. vi is still there and useful, but a bit harder to use. I've just moved on to nano.

On my RPIs I simply ssh into them to do any work. Note that if I writing an application for the RPI, a lot of times I'll simply write it on my workstation using a GUI editor such as geany. Then sftp the file over to the RPI when ready to test. Easy peasy. But for configuration changes, I can simply ssh in, go to root, edit a config file with nano and done. Note I have quite a few RPIs around. With SSH I can use one keyboard and monitor (my workstation) to access them all. No monitor/keyboard/mouse required for each. Saves a lot of space .

Some things are simpler with GUI, some with the CLI. Both have their place.

I think the standard layout sucks actually. Felt much better after I pried out the caps lock keys.
Thank you. I need to hear that from time to time.
HAHA

That's interesting. I wouldn't want to neuter innovation and fun with management, but I bet that makes a company more liquid/tradeable.

That's fascinating and actually makes sense. The inflexibility of paper and ink has special cognitive properties. Check out my multimonitor setup.



Where do yous like to go for underground scripts and tricks?