[nycbug-talk] fave BSD tips/tricks?

[Andy Kosela]

Brian Cully <bcully at gmail.com> wrote:

> 	As George says, it's not 1995 anymore. Developers are starting to  
> reach for GUI toolkits for administration over CLI, and some tasks are  
> just plain better done in GUI, anyway (wireshark is a huge win over  
> tcpdump, especially in a crunch).

Yes, some tasks are done better in Windows, especially for people who
are used to point & click behavior.  </sarcasm>

The UNIX toolkit is a set of standard CLI tools mainly centered around
pipe "glue".  I agree whole heartedly with David Korn who once said:

"There are many people who use UNIX or Linux who IMHO do not understand
UNIX.  UNIX is not just an operating system, it is a way of doing
things, and the shell plays a key role by providing the glue that makes
it work.  The UNIX methodology relies heavily on reuse of a set of tools
rather than on building monolithic applications.  Even perl programmers
often miss the point, writing the heart and soul of the application as
perl script without making use of the UNIX toolkit."  --David Korn 


GUI is not a UNIX way of doing things.  I am aware that some of you can 
be spoiled by desktop Linux and its race to imitate Windows, but still 
there are people out there who grew up on vi(1) and still copy their 
files using cp(1) and not some fancy GUI file manager.  Like it or not 
UNIX will be always centered around ASCII plain text format and CLI.  
Those GUI front-ends only unnecessary complicate things.

--Andy