So I have been in a Windows world pretty heavily since Windows 95 came out. Actually since before it came out, I was on the beta and downloaded all of it as floppy images over a 14.4k baud phone connection that miraculously stayed alive for two and a half days, much to the chagrin of my mom! I still would use the command line for things like ipconfig to find, release and renew IPs, or to deal with batch stuff, things like that. It has been a long time since I used it to navigate the operating system. I guess I was turned off by counting to 8 and adding ~1 to everything.
Since the resurgence of Linux for me, I am truly amazed at how the GUI had allowed me to lose touch with how efficient the command line can be. There are quite a few things that truly benefit from losing the OS’s Graphical User Interface. The largest benefit for me is file searching. I think the wizard interface for Windows actually slows me down quite a bit. Let’s face it, for most of us, we have a good idea of what drive it is on, and what the file name might contain, and definitely what the extension is going to be. I think I would be much more apt to type something like:
dir /s *image*.gif
To me that is much more efficient than going through the Windows file searching utility and it’s wizard, most of which is slowed down by selecting which drives you want to search and what kind of files.
I used the example above to illustrate that command line use isn’t limited to Linux/Unix there is great speed and power to be found in Windows and Mac OS X by pulling up a command line and going on with your bad self.
For those of you that are ultra tech savvy, check out the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, you will find a network command prompt that will allow you to execute command line instructions on a remote computer on your network. I will admit to having quite a bit of fun with these particular powertoys, especially the process killer and such. I had a guy at one of my old jobs throwing fits, he would open a browser, I would close it and just snicker to myself. Good stuff.
JB
Tweet