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Re: [LUG] Whats so "dirty" about command line

 

Mike Martin wrote:
> 
> Stating the obvious, but there is a big difference between using the
> command line (about half an hour to learn the basics) and learning to
> program in bash.

Half an hour?

You've never taught it to people professionally, from scratch, have you?

To make any non-trivial use of the command line you need to understand
file permissions and groups, directory hierarchy amongst other things. A
whole lot of context to learn, that people switching from Windows will
generally not have.

Most Windows users have only the most brief understanding of these
things for Windows, and most are near panic when asked to type things
into a Command window. Mind you I feel that way about Windows command
line, I mean what sort of "tab" completion is that?!

Sure they don't have to leave being able to type out;

sed -i20070212 -e 's/debian.blueyonder.co.uk/debian.virginmedia.com/g'
/etc/apt/sources.list

But they may well need to leave knowing how to find out what this does,
and to understand that it is something they might need privileges to do.

Yet that is a change that can readily be made using a GUI, and I might
well have done it with a GUI if I'd only needed to do it on one machine.
So now I need a loop, or at least command history editing, and suddenly
it is the end of day 3 of the training course....

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