Comments on: 7 Tasks You Shouldn’t Use a GUI For

By: Tariq

Tariq — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:08:40 +0000

All are useful but 3. You should be using mp3wrap and ffmpeg for mp3 merging. Also, you completely missed out on searching, is there anything more useful than ‘find’ and ‘grep’ on the cli?

By: SeismicMike

SeismicMike — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:26:29 +0000

@bobsmith:

You make some compelling points but remember these advantages of the command line:

1. No GUI. By that I mean, no graphics or any of that to load, which means far less resource hogging

2. More power. Yeah, GUIs are nice if you’re not real sure what you’re doing or if you want to accomplish a simple task, but I know for sure that there are many tasks that I far prefer to do from command line because of the power it gives me in one simple command. Yeah I gotta remember some weird syntax, but it’s better than waiting for the app to load, then clicking 5-10 menu buttons, etc.

By: Mark Sanborn

Mark Sanborn — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:24:05 +0000

With power, comes great responsibility.
- Someone smart

By: Cameron

Cameron — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:35:41 +0000

Has anyone mentioned how dangerous the dd command is?

If you put in one wrong drive letter and do a block for block copy you could kill your whole hard drive.

Just throwing out there that it is one of the dumbest suggestions to bring up from a data safety standpoint.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:47:39 +0000

Good stuff. You forgot a big one — backups. Set an rsync -ra /disk/one /disk/two (or something like that) as a cron task.

By: richs-lxh

richs-lxh — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:49:41 +0000

Your tips and guides get better and better, thanks for taking us back to basics. One more i would add is that Linux users should never use a gui to update/upgrade their system. A simple Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to the terminal and then a “sudo killall gdm” to kill the graphical desktop. This avoids all the possible Xorg/Graphic-Driver problems which many new users face when upgrading and dist-upgrading their system.

rich

By: George

George — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:58:45 +0000

I used the mp3 splicing trick just now for lord of the rings, the version i have is split up into multiple files, using that simple and easily remembered trick i now have them in one file per movie.

By: ewanm89

ewanm89 — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:43:21 +0000

Once the CLI is known it can be faster, but say I want to resize a whole directory of files, I would script it. The biggest advantages of the CLI usually is faster execution of application (drawing text is nowhere near as complicated as a GUI leaving more CPU time free for the actual Math in the application) and also for scripting and such.

As far as the MP3 splicing, tagging one after the other like that also means you have extra headers and also it kills of the efficiency of some of the compression steps (hint, it’s not all lossy).

If I happen to already have a terminal open I may use it, and if I happen to have the GUI app open for some reason I may use that. depends on what I need to do and what I already have up. I always burn CDs using he CLI because I’m so use to doing it that way for example.

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:23:04 +0000

unzip | touch myself | zip

By: vicente

vicente — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:50:10 +0000

Christoph, thank you for the basename command and the awk magic.

Maybe these two miniscripts are helpful for somebody.

Converting all images of a folder to jpg:

for i in $(ls); do
convert $i `basename $i .$(echo $i | awk -F. ‘{print $NF}’)`.jpg;
done;

Resizing all images of a folder, adding “-small” to their names:

for i in $(ls); do
ext=`echo $i | awk -F. ‘{print $NF}’`;
convert -resize 300 $i `basename $i .$ext`-small.$ext;
done;