[PLUG] CLI v/s GUI

[Aditya Godbole]

On 5/9/06, devendralaulkar at gmail.com <devendralaulkar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tuesday 09 May 2006 07:19, Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
> In the above case, you are using the CLI, not the GUI (the author mentions the
> distinction in the definition itself) The article is focusing on system
> administration, not coding.
>
> Given a server to administor, would you rather manage things like ip address,
> routing options etc through a GUI tool like Yast or through the command line.
> Personally I would prefer the CLI, because the GUI cannot usually capture all
> the options present.

System administration has got nothing to do with what interface you are using.
You can use a GUI editor for writing to the configuration files. You
can schedule commands and scripts using GUI interface. You can do a
lot of adminstration using option-based tools like Yast. Webmin is an
excellent example.
While it is true that there will always be things you cannot do using
a GUI, most of the common tasks can be made much easier. It is also
true that runing a GUI takes up more resources and that might be
undesirable.
I agree that the functionality that you can achieve using the CLI is a
superset of that you can achieve using option-based interfaces. But
that is no reason to belittle option-based interfaces.
Personally, I would prefer a CLI, but if a option-based interface
(graphic or text) is going to make life easier, I'll use it.

-aditya