No more right click terminal

[Brent D. Norris]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Colin Walters wrote:
> Completely, totally disagree.  Every time a non-developer/non-sysadmin
> has to use the terminal for something is a bug.

This is a very odd statement since one of the reasons that I was turned on
to Linux was that one of my teachers used to use a CLI command to figure
his entire class grades in one swoop.  He entered his grades into a text
file using vi and then had a command aliased that would figure everything
up for him.

It was about two lines long and contained various calls to awk/sed, cut,
grep, wc, sort and all kinds of other things.  If you were to tell him
that you expected him to do that in some kinda gui (like excel or OO) he
would flunk you from the class.  His point about the whole thing was that
he could type: grade_report semester2_class3.txt >
final_grade_semester2_class3.txt  and it would do everything for him in
less time than it took for Excel to open on his Windows machine that the
University gave him.

What exactly is the fastest way in a GUI to take the output of a file that
has all the grades for an entire class in it, figure everyone's grades,
separate them based upon email address, and then mail them individually
from a GUI, while also mailing them ALL to his Department head in like 10
seconds?

This is not a Linux Administrator either.  As a matter of fact he ask me
to help him set up his new network card in the machine like two months
later.  This was just a Unix user, that had learned the value and power of
the CLI.

Heck even MS is attempting to get the CLI involved in the OS again as
evidenced by their desire to come up with a CLI that is better than BASH.
They are attempting to emulate Linux because of the arguement that a lot
of people have for using it: "I like using Linux because I don't have to
know were every setting is in some GUI somewhere.  All I have to do is
edit a text file and that changes the settings slick and easy."  You are
advocating moving toward their current model, while they are moving toward
ours.

Regardless of how you get there (right click, application menu,
CTRL+ALT+F1) using the command line is NOT a bug.

Brent Norris