terminal potentials

L

lucasraggers

Rotterdam
I just used terminal to trash a naughty file. Took the instructions from this forum.

Right now terminal frightens me, I don't like codes. Help me understand terminal.

What is terminal? For what do you use? What are its potentials? Where can i find instructions for terminal?
 
Personally I use it to work the system through the "backend". A lot more no-bull*&^% sometimes. I use it for email (mutt). I use it for news (tin). And a lot more. I always have Terminal windows open. If you want to learn more about what you can do with it, I would highly recommend the O'Reilly book 'Learning The UNIX Operating System'. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunix5/ . This is also probably a good one: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunixmacosx/ .
 
For me, the OS's gui is just a way for me to have open alot of terminals :) 99% of the work I do is in terminal, much faster.

Brian
 
'Unix for MAC OSX' by O'Riley would be best because it is similar to 'Learning Unix' by O'Riley but it is based on OS X. I just bought it today and find it very informative for the novice unix user.
 
Now this I thought was very interesting; I learnt about this on a UI/usability course at my university. These are results from a study conducted by Temple, Barker & Sloane in 1990:

- A group of users were asked to do a certain number of tasks using both the command line (in this case presumably DOS) and in a GUI (most likely Windows 3.something).
- The aim was to be efficient.

<pre>
CLI GUI
Completed tasks 35% more
Correctly completed 74% 91%
Frustration of novices 5.4 2.7
Stress 5.8 4.3
Attempted tasks 23% more
</pre>

Now the interesting part is, that ALL the participants thought they had been faster and more efficient using the command line, even though in all cases the exact opposite was true. Why? Perhaps because a GUI requires much less cognitive overhead whereas using a command line requires much more thinking and the user has a continuous feeling that he/she is "doing something".
 
celeborn: I'd like to see this done again today, in a Unix environment. DOS is severely lacking compared to Unix. I think I am more efficient in Windows Explorer than the Finder, actually. But certain things I am sure I am quicker with on the command line than the GUI.
 
Originally posted by hazmat
celeborn: I'd like to see this done again today, in a Unix environment. DOS is severely lacking compared to Unix. I think I am more efficient in Windows Explorer than the Finder, actually. But certain things I am sure I am quicker with on the command line than the GUI.
Click to expand...

I totaly agree. The more you use the CLI the more efficient you get. If you notice the correctly completed tasks for the CLI was significantly lower than the GUI. I'm sure a large part of this is misspellings and incorrect switches. I'm sure for some people the GUI is faster. Daily, I find many things faster, for me, in the CLI
 
What I'd like to see is this test conducted with users who are skilled in both using the GUI and the CLI. That would give a real sense of which is more efficient. I do believe that a lot of the efficiency and speed using the CLI is only perceived and not in fact real.
 
That's probably true - the CLI feels more efficient because you're thinking too hard to get bored.

I still maintain though, that once you figure out a little basic shell scripting (the foreach loop, especially), many repetitive tasks can be much more efficient using the CLI.

For example, I can't imagine taking a folder full of 30 mp3 files with names like some_artist-some_song.mp3, and changing that to a group of folders called "Some Artist" full of files called "Some Song.mp3" without writing a loop for it. Granted, most people aren't as obsessive over the file names of their mp3s as I am, but...
 
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