[members at lugog] Introduction:

[MJ Ray]

john lewis wrote:
> I learnt to use the command line because for most of my linux using
> life I used windowmaker as my preferred interface and unlike gnome that
> didn't do things like popping up an icon when I popped a CD in the
> drive, plugged in a usb stick or my camera. So I got used to the
> idea I had to go to a terminal and type in 'mount /dev/whatever' 

No, no-one's *had* to go to a terminal for that for ages.  There's
udev, some automounters (I think amd was around when I started using
GNU/Linux 15 or so years ago), or even simply adding commands to the
windowmaker menu.  Using a terminal and typing was a choice... maybe
the other options weren't known to you, but they were probably there.

Knowing how to use the command line does have other benefits, though.
Everything probably should be accessible from it as a last resort and
to make it easy for even entry-level programmers to connect stuff
together quickly into homebrew tools.  I made two shell scripts at
work yesterday: one that downloads, edits and replaces bibliographic
records in a library catalogue; and one that gets task details from
our management system and creates a project overview graph which can
be opened by dotty.  Both are really basic 1-2-3 grunt work tasks, but
it's good to script it and I think automating either task on Windows
would require more serious programming.  Or maybe Windows has some
wonderful built-in scripting language that I don't know about yet?

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/