[Sussex] Label and partition external hard drive

[Steven Dobson]

Hi Desmond

On 25/02/11 00:01, Desmond Armstrong wrote:
>  On 24/02/11 14:16, Alex Harrington wrote:
>>> Sorry, Desmond, I know GUI is "easier" but I want:
>> That's all fair enough, but if it were me I'd be using a gparted or
>> partedmagic live CD and have the job done in 15 minutes.
>>
>> I agree it's good to understand the basics, but gparted will show you
>> roughly what it's doing so you'll get the general idea.
> 
> To be honest when one has a GUI one can work faster.

I'm sorry but I have to take issue with this.  *Some* things are quicker
in GUI-land, some are quicker in CLI-land.  Which one is better depends
mostly on the task at hand.

By knowing both you place yourself in the best position to get the job
done quickly and efficiently.

Today I used GUI tools to download a torrent file, then download the
file I wanted and then a burn it to a blank CD.  But each stage
transition I had to sit there and action the next.

If I had done it with the CLI I could have written all three task
commands at one time and then gone away and down something much more
interesting.

Horses for courses.

The power of the CLI comes from it's ability to script.  Whether that is
an adhoc script written once on the command line or more formally in a
script file.

One task, as a coder, I do a lot is go looking for code examples in
other code files.  Here the command line wins hand down compared with
any GUI tool I've seen.  I can find(1) files based for a file name
pattern.  Then look within them [grep(1)] for string matches.

Here's how you look for Java programs that use the JLabel class.

  $ find . -name \*.java | xarg	grep -w JLabel

But if you want to look for Java files that use the JLabel class and
also make use of the setText() method:

  $ file . -name \*.java | xarg grep -lw JLabel | xarg grep setText

So long as I can think of a way of scripting it I can write a script.
But for GUI uses you are reliant on the GUI developer providing the
facility.  If there is no "find" function in your editor then you can't
quickly find the text you're looking for.

> At the same time
> one does need to aware of what it is doing. Our difficulty is that we
> are constantly learning new procedures, which is good, but one should
> avoid taking too much time to do a once off. There are just too many
> things that we have to do.

I would like to remind people that if you don't understand and can
control a computer it will control you!  Computer programs now control
our lives.  Whether your shopping at Tescos or driving your car there is
a computer involved somewhere.  So you better be the one in control.

Steve
-- 
Steve "Dobbo" Dobson