Ask Slashdot: Command Line Interfaces -- What Is Out There?

Mars729 writes "GUIs are walled gardens in that features available in one piece of software is not available to other pieces of software. However, there is software out there with command-line options that can make software features accessible to power users and programmers. Some important ones I have uncovered are:

• Exiftool: A command-line application that can read/write almost any kind of metadata contained in almost any filetype
• Imagemagick: This and similar software like GraphicsMagick is a full-feature toolkit for displaying, converting and editing image files.
• Irfanview: Like Imagemagick but faster, although it has much fewer features.
  FFMpeg: For video files
• VLC: For audio and video files
• Aspell: A command line spell checker
• Google Static Maps API: A URL with coordinates, markers, zoom levels and other options to show a custom map from Google Maps. (I just uncovered this: no need to learn KML!)

Less useful but still useful are command shells. These provide file management mostly. I believe some of them may allow for sending and retrieving email messages. Also useful but less accessible and with a steeper learning curve are software with APIs and scripting. Examples would be Visual Basic for Applications in office software and groovy scripting for Freeplane. What else is out there?"

Comments

Re:What is this?

[Pseudonym Authority]

No, fuck off. If you want to be spoon fed, go to stackoverflow and get mostly-correct answers from unemployed people who will never flame you, no matter how idiotic your questions are. Well actually, a question like "Holy shit I found out that I can use the keyboard to start my music app, what programs also have this feature" would probably get closed for being completely fucking retarded there too. If you actually wanted to learn, you would pick up a damn book (just about any book would be educational for the submitter (which is most likely you)) or use Google to actually check and see if those mythical CLI email programs exist.

Less useful but still useful are command shells. These provide file management mostly. I believe some of them may allow for sending and retrieving email messages.

Holy shit, you can start off with DOS for Dummies and work your way up from there.

But anyway, I will attempt to answer your question:

What else is out there?

Every program on every major operating system can be launched from the shell, and 99% of these can accept command line arguments. Is there any other vague, poorly-thought-out questions you'd like to ask?