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Does Terminal use actually make sense in the real world? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?

For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let's be honest, it makes us feel superior)

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[–] 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Pipes etc.

A GUI can't combine commands from several different programs and move data to and from and use that with the ease and explicit nature of a terminal.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    GUIs can use pipes just fine. You tell it to write to a named pipe or similar device and the program on the other end will happily consume it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    But only if the gui very specifically designs for it. With a cli you can generally wrangle arbitrary command into a pipeline.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No, if it implements any standard file I/O, it'll work. Write to a fifo and then consume it with the other application. Or write into the fifo from another application and read it with the GUI app.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The point is that you can't "pipe GUI output to other command", the GUI would actually have to serialize things in a useful way and send to that fifo. Similarly you can't send stuff to it's stdin and expect it to do anything sane.

    Further, since you can't seek() in a fifo, a lot of likely GUI applications involving files would break on trying to deal with a fifo. Also the typical GUI app on read doesn't assume a 'tail -f' like approach to arbitrary file inputs.

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