Is command prompt redundant?

Post Reply New Topic

If not why would you use it?

It's faster.
It's a lot faster when working via ssh.
It's often more transparent than graphical GUIs.
You have more control over the program's behavior and see the messages it sends.
You can make and run scripts.
There are still tools relying on it and some people use them.
Programs often have much more options when run in commandline - it's about economy, adding an option requires less work than adding an option and gui for it.
If you do programming for efficiency, graphics are just a parasite (unless your program is about displaying graphics, ofc)

I'm sure this list is not complete.

I use it to rename files in order to change the file type.

I too use it to change file types, since modern incarnations of Windows are so dumbed down and patronising that we're not permitted to do it directly anymore. I also think the console is useful, as magz pointed out, for running programs one has written for his own convenience, without intending to distribute them. Personally, I'd be happy if all the programs I use were console based, as far as this would be possible. The only problems the Windows console has is the inability to highlight text and it's incompatibility with UNICODE.

Use it every day at work, on green screens. It's the tools I have to use to do my job. The software is old, like me!

I don't mind using commands such as FIND or SAVE, but I hate things like "LACT JOB=VH*".

I use it pretty much constantly, but I write data processing and networking software and have since like the nineties, so I'm probably not an average case.

I use it to navigate around files and directories, moving and editing them. I use it for my text editor (vim). I use it for interactive code consoles. I use it to ssh to other computers for maintenance or to check status. I use it to run data processing programs and start services. I use it to grab data files from the web for analysis.

Generally, though, if you want to get "under the hood" and start to understand how computers--and especially network servers--work under all the pretty graphical interfaces, then command prompts are a great way to get into it.

The command prompt has been replaced by powershell in Windows. Powershell is a much more powerful scripting language I use it every day in work for writing deployment scripts and remotely detecting and fixing errors. It's the dogs bollocks and very easy to learn if you have already used the CMD prompt.

I've heard of Powershell, though my Windows doesn't have it. Personally, I'd rather just use Python in IDLE than learn a new purely shell-based language.

To highlight text you have to right click on the CMD window and press mark. It will then let you highlight text and right click to store in clipboard.

You can also just use the greater than sign to output to text file eg.

Ipconfig > ipconfig.txt

The text selecttion was fixed in Windows 10

PowerShell isn't as much a language as a disorganized set of bindings for every feature that ships in Windows. I did some provisioning automation with it at work last year & there's a lot more one can do in the Windows shell(s) than from a singular programming environment. Nothing really prevents anyone from invoking either language from the other & they both have their advantages.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

This Quora answer might be of interest:

'What is the Purpose of a Computer's Command Prompt Function in Layman's Terms, and What Does it Do That You Can't Already Do on Your Computer?'

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-purpo ... r-computer

Command lines can be used to tell a computer to do the entirety of a task. GUIs tend to be far more interactive and rigged to do only parts of a task at a time - click here, drag there, double-click this, select an item from the menu, wait for the options to load, choose one, wait again...

With a command line, it's far more often possible to describe the entire task to be done, and let the computer then get on with it while you do something else that isn't sitting around, futzing with the controls and waiting, waiting, waiting until it lets you do the next tiny sub-task.

On top of that, command-line commands can be far more easily copied into scripts, which makes them able to be trivially replicated whenever needed, and then applied to entire batches of information in one go. It's a lot more difficult to make a computer do all your work for you from a point-and-click interface. There's a reason 99% of programming languages and interfaces are text-based. They're far more precise and less fluffy.

GUIs are great for things which require instant feedback and direct human intervention/assessment. Games. Art. Responding to visual things precisely and accurately in real time. But they tend to be s**t for heavy-duty computing; the stuff which doesn't use human interaction because it would be too slow or the required calculations too inaccurate.