The most important commands for newbies
OK, to start, first we need to know why. Why the Terminal and not some fancy, easy GUI with buttons, menus, and a results window?
Between 1970 and 1998, computers were not powerful, and many basic administrative tasks were done via a command line (or a console) in a Terminal. Additionally, GUI SW required too many HW resources and was much harder to write. There were no rich graphics libraries, and for developers, it was a lot easier to write applications that get input from the terminal and then print the results there.
Even nowadays, many of the tasks presented in this chapter can be done in the fastest way via a terminal. Let’s say we have an application that accepts 10 different commands, with 5 to 10 options each. This results in a minimum of 50 tasks that it can perform. A terminal-only application will only have one input command processor, directly triggering any given function. Although that’s not easy, it’...
