in defense of the command line

[Rich Caloggero]

This is a great analogy, and its the way the computer "thinks" of commands.
What's hard for newbies, in my opinion, and even for us folks who have been
around linux for awhile, are the verbs themselves. The names were invented
when the GUI didn't exist, so they needed to be quick to type. This makes
for alphabet soup very quickly. If you put the time in, you can remember a
lot of commands, but it does take time, and if your motovation is, for the
most part, task oriented, putting in the time to memorize cryptic command
names is probably not what you want to do. Me, I like computers and play
with them for their own sake, but many people just want to get work done and
want the computer to be transparrent, something which does what they tell it
and no more and no less. This is a tall order, and will only become a
reality when AI, or something like it, becomes a reality. At that point,
things will have grown in complexity by another order of magnitude, and the
only beings which will be able to understand computers all the way down to
the bits are computers themselves! Fortunately for us hackers, that won't
happen overnight!! <smile>

Check out the oxygen project at the MIT lcs. at http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu
for more on what I believe to be the future of computation. What worries me
a bit about this is the reliance on the visual. 3D display technology is
almost here, and sighted people will find many ways to take advantage of
this. It could be like the dawn of windows all over again for us blinks!


Just my humble opinion!

                    Rich

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Hallenbeck" <hallenbeck at valstar.net>
To: "Speakup Distribution List" <speakup at speech.braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: 20 May, 2002 6:50 AM
Subject: in defense of the command line


Octavius and others seem to be intimidated by the command line.
Here is what helps me:

Think of a Linux command as a "sentence". The name of the command
is the verb of the sentence, it tells what to do. Sometimes that
is all there is to a command line. But usually you have to name
some objects of the action, what thing or things should be acted
on. Often those objects are the names of files. A sentence has a
verb and it has objects, so the sentence thing still works.

Example:

wc myfile.txt

The verb is "wc" and the thing the verb acts on is "myfile.txt".

The next step is to modify or qualify the action of the verb.
This is usually done on the command line between the verb and its
object or objects. These modifiers or qualifiers are called
"options" and start with a dash (-) character. Those are the
adverbs or adjectives of the sentence.

Example:

ls -t

The verb is "ls" and the adverb is "-t", which lists the files in
the order they were last modified or changed (t for time, not
hard to remember).

So, if the command line frightens you, think of it as a language,
made up of sentences, and sentences made up of a verb (just one
verb), maybe one or more adverbs or adjectives, and maybe one or
more objects for the verb to act on.


Now - everybody learn to talk Linux!

Chuck



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