Originally posted by t h
Actually, this is often a great thing. If you are trying to automate secure file transfers (e.g., with a cronjob), being able to write a little shell script and use public key authentication is a heck of a lot better than manually diddling with a GUI every single day.
Yes, but this isn't really an option for someone who isn't comfortable with a shell. My point was this: Secure transfers are a great idea, but the command line utilities available to do them are not particularly easy to use (and I think this is broadly true of encryption utilities) with the end result that people don't encrypt things nearly as often as they should.
Even if one considers GUIs to be an inefficient use of resources -- which is a clearly dubious position, given the fact that processor and memory resources are generally in such abundance -- I think it's pretty clear that for most uses and most users, running an SSH/SCP/SFTP GUI is going to make life easier. But yet there are people who will extol the virtues of running SCP from the command line simply because it's run from the command line. And that's lame for a bunch of reasons, but the most important reason why that's lame is that it scares people away from using something that they want to use.
Simply put, this is what I like about OS X: if you want to use your G3 or G4 processor to edit text files in terminal mode, you can do that -- and doing so certainly gives you an incredible amount of control, and plus it feels good to geek out like that (we all take pleasure in talking about shell scripts that we've written) -- but you don't *have* descend down to the command line.
Thankfully the old attitudes, being, on the one side, a complete dependence on GUIs, and on the other, a fetishized attachment to the arcana command lines and terminals (as if this were somehow more "authentic" computing) are both giving way to a sort of admixture in which people people use whatever achieves their goals in a way that they're comfortable with.
Dan