Doug Freyburger wrote:
> Cindy Hamilton wrote:
>> Well, it certainly takes all kinds. I can make the Unix shell sit up
>> and do tricks, but Windows just sits there staring at me, waiting for
>> me to click in the wrong place and do something I didn't want it to
>> do. Or worse, click in the right place, and have to reassure it that
>> I really did want to do that.
>
> One time some of my folks asked why I use the command line all the time.
> One day we needed to add 3 print queues to 50 machines at once. I asked
> who wanted to do it how. Person A signed up to wander the halls and add
> all 3 to each machine. Person B signed up to sit at her own machine and
> run the GUI remotely. I asked them to check in every 10 minutes. Then
> I used the GUI on the 3 machines that were cabled to the printers to add
> the queues there. Then I typed in a loop to add the first queue on the
> other 49. Command line edit for the next 49. Command line edit for the
> next 49. At the first check in call the other two folks reported the
> queue was already there on a lot of hosts. I invited them to my desk to
> look at my screen.

Since XP windows has become a bit more admin-friendly, but now it
suffers from verbal diarrhea. I easily can remember something like
"ifconfig eth0 192.168.10.10/24". To do the same thing in windows, it
becomes something like "netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area
Connection" source=static addr=192.168.10.10 255.255.255.0". Looks like
somebody got told to 'make it possible through the command line, so we
can shut up the detractors, but make it so difficult that we can still
claim GUI is faster. Oh, and don't make it easy to find'

IBM did right with AIX and smitty: they implemented the best of both
worlds, with a GUI (text-based if all you had was a text console) that
showed the command-line equivalent with one keypress (F5 or F6 IIRC).
Pity lots of the commands were a bit verbose.

-j