The Command Line - Best Newbie Interface?

An anonymous reader writes "This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them."

Comments

Re:The 'help' command

[pandrijeczko]

Just do an alias of "help" to "man -k".

As long as "makewhatis" is setup first, that will do about the same thing.

Re:4Dos

[muffen]

Remember??

I still today spend way more time in a 4DOS (or well, 4NT) prompt than I do in the windows GUI.
Virtually everything I do at work is done via 4NT BTM files (batchfiles that only work in 4DOS/4NT).

The CMD line interface is really good, and it makes me a little sad that new computerusers don't realize this.
Some things are just done so much quicker using the CMD interface...

For example, I use multiple computers at work, and I have to transfer files between them all the time.. I do this using 4NT BTM's, and it takes a few seconds to transfer a file... doing the same thing in a FTP app takes much longer...

Re:The 'help' command

[PowerBert]

bash has a help builtin which will direct the user to man and info commands.

$ help foobar
-bash: help: no help topics match `foobar'. Try `help help' or `man -k foobar' or `info foobar'.

Obligatory IBM Model M link

[oneiros27]

The Model M is still being made, under a different name, but you can now get them with a 'windows' key, or even in black.

http://www.pckeyboard.com/customizer.html

Re:Perfect Example - ImageMagick

[ScRoNdO]

Well, that would be better:

for image in *.tif; do convert $image -border 50 -bordercolor \#FFFFFF -quality 100 -scale 25% -resolution 96 ${image%.tif}.jpg; done

no need to do `ls *.tif`, and the bash specific construct ${image%.tif} removes a trailing occurence of the word '.tif' from the string $image

Re:The 'help' command

[zaphod110676]

I've never found info intuitive at all. The pinfo command however works great. It is a lynx style viewer for info pages. It required little work to figure out and is great when you hit those man pages that say:
"The full documentation for ls is maintained as a Texinfo manual."