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)
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.
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.
But only if the gui very specifically designs for it. With a cli you can generally wrangle arbitrary command into a pipeline.
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.
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.
Yeah you can’t run a one-line pipeline, but you can still pipe between applications. Just a little more asynchronously.
Some GUIs