Is command prompt redundant?

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I didn't have Windows on the first computer I had way back in the early 90s so I had to learn DOS. I later learned the Linux shell for a couple of programming jobs I've had. Now I mainly use Python for command-line scripting since it's a lot more flexible than the limited # of commands in DOS or Bash shells.

Didn't know that Python had been around since the early 90s as well.. maybe I should have started with that right then.

If you need to change a file type/extension in Windows, you don't need the command prompt just to do that; but you do need to make file extensions visible, so you can edit them. Below are several tutorials on how to do that.

- https://www.thewindowsclub.com/show-fil ... in-windows
- https://www.howtogeek.com/205086/beginn ... xtensions/
- https://www.howtohaven.com/system/show- ... orer.shtml
- https://www.itsupportguides.com/knowled ... xtensions/
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutori ... n-windows/

It's a lot easier to give people directions for doing stuff in Command Prompt. The number of times I've pointed to something and had people not spot it.

To say nothing of giving people directions over the phone. I'd never do telephonic tech support. I can't imagine how horrible it must be to troubleshoot a graphical user interface when you can't even see it.

I find command prompts/terminal just so much easier to wrap my head around than the overwhelming possibilities of GUI's. Being bombarded with menus, and menu's within those menu's, just overwhelms my brain. Whenever I use a terminal, it only shows what I absolutely need it to show. So no, I do not find the command prompt redundant, especially if you're having to work on remote servers at all.

I miss it. I miss text based menus also. Icons with no words are horrible and unintuitive. Heck, even old style icons were intuitive. I miss old style Windows. I used to love it and I used to love tweaking it.

In large scale datacenters, you can 'waste' a lot of disk space and processing power running graphical interfaces. In these cases, gong 'headless' makes a lot of sense.

On a personal level, I enjoy terminals for their speed (4-5 words in a single command can often replace 10-20 clicks), and use them to script re-occurring tedious processes.

There are definitely cases where a GUI makes more sense. It is a lot faster, for example, to select several files in a folder and copy them somewhere else using a GUI. GUIs can also offer a better visualization of data in terms of charts and graphs, and that can be useful for monitoring. GUIs are also often better for multitasking, as you can have multiple things on screen at the same time.

I don't think either are going anywhere, nor see them as redundant. They are different tools with different pros and cons.

Redundant? I feel like I spend half my life in the command prompt.

drush cr

I guess you could say it's obsoleted by PowerShell but but not everything works in both consoles. Windows will always be a catch-all for everyone's software dependencies rather than one single purpose built OS.

Most days I still can't believe I worked on that thing.

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