I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?
For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
It makes sense for scripting. You can build a process in a file to share among yourself and various devices or with friends to do a certain task on an automated basis.
Even on Windows this is useful to schedule a task in Task Scheduler.
Maybe every Monday, you want your computer to restart. A really quick and basic bash could be written to “shutdown /r /t 0” I can’t remember the exact command and then that file gets executed in Task Scheduler at the specific time you want.
There are other uses like having a file set to rename files. I do this often for my Plex server because I like a specific naming convention on multiple files and to do it quickly.
It’s nicer than GUI because everything can be laid out for you in a manual as to what you need as simple commands and much easier to guide someone because it’s not “click to the far right, no not the side of the screen, but slightly far right and then click this icon that looks like a pineapple but is actually a microphone and then click the icon…” Whereas a command line is just “type in shutdown and then enter y when prompted” and “these are all the available commands and what they do”.
I will say GUIs are nicer for hiding Easter eggs, but also a few devs seem to enjoy making useful features like Easter eggs where I am just now finding out that a button to the far left of the screen has existed and does this useful function. I don’t have that issue in command line tools that have even the most basic documentation.