Why do normal users fear command lines?

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Lau, you really tried it ? omg you're lucky ! !! don't try the other commands given here, Unix really don't give second chances.... it doesn't ask for confirmation. If you had been root and used the right syntax, you would have lost your machine even before your finger had finished unpressing the enter key ....

That would be amazing.

it would suffice to use count=1. Your MBR and your partition table will be gone. Not that I ever tried this of course, but I restored MBRs in a similar way.

Why is this thread turning into "How to kill your Linux system?"

This might be why some people fear the command line.

Right, we need some ways to kill DOS as well

Well, there are times when you need to overwrite the MBR, for example if an evil Windoze bootmanager squats there. of course you don't use /dev/zero as input file but the name of the backup of your MBR

Scenario... a room full of terminals, with a guy giving a course on Unix. (This is way before Linux was dreamt of... around 1980, I think.)

The guy was so sure of himself, he said "You can't cause any problem with the other users on the system... whatever you do will only affect your own account, and I can replace that straight away... so experiment away."

So, sat in my login directory, I did "rm ..". All the student accounts vanished.

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Oh. And the "dd if=/dev/zero" command... I regularly use that, with count=1000, to remove all trace of Windows from a drive, otherwise it always seems to dredge up something that is left over from a prior install.

The command line is invaluable for automation and for remote administration. I don't ever want to see unix boxes get so dumbed down that you have to use a GUI to accomplish a system administration task (or any task for that matter)

Without the ability to customize the system with scripts it would be pretty useless. and that goes for any computer system. Imagine trying to have VMS without DCL or OS/400 without CL.

A lot of what many people think is "obsolete" is the glue that holds their fancy GUI systems together.

and as far as the comment that you shouldn't need to read a manual to understand how to use your computer.. I call BS on that one. Just because there is a GUI does not mean you can be lazy and not write good documentation.


If people can't be bothered to read a manual they don't deserve to use a computer.

yes, it's the glue that keeps everything together.

I think all instructions manuals i saw in my life for a GUI were the kind of "To delete the file, press the delete button".... This is for end-users, like the infamous "don't stop the chain with your hand (in a chainsaw's manual) or, the content can become hot when heated lol.... When you spot a user on your network that actually NEEDS to read that kind of manual, you know that if you ever have to do something in the command line on thier PC, you hang-up, you take a walk up to thier office, and do it yourself LOL!!

But when you are writing a complex command line full of switches and options and variables, that will for intance, backup the company's "account receivable database" each night, it would be pretty suicidal to not have your open book right beside your keyboard....


i put count=2 in my dd command so not only the MBR is overwritten but also the first sector of your first partition (which is your OS's bootsector or worst, a part of your kernel's code, on 98% of the machines out there).... this is fatal. even if you recover your MBR, you won't recover your system.

And, for the original question (sorry for derailing the thread), i think it's the surprise effect, when that black window opens, poeple are disoriented cause there are no buttons, no nice background, no menu bars at the top, no flirty paper clips and then, to add to the shock, you ask them to type words they never heard before, words that have no meaning to them, and with a usually bizar syntax (which has to be exact, a / is not a \...).

A command-line interface, for many tasks and users, is the wrong user interface. CLIs are far less intuitive, instead requiring the user to memorize a long list of commands, the parameters they take, and how to use them. A person with a minimal knowledge of the commands can at least perform basic filesystem upkeep, but for anything more advanced, he or she will need to find help, and the built-in help (e.g., man or info) presumes familiarity with its commands and keyboard shortcuts. For a nontechnical user who has some foggy apperception of this, the responsibility and prerequisites can be truly frightening. To use a car analogy, it would be like asking a typical car owner to fix his or her own engine; you'll give him or her instructions over the phone, so there can't possibly be any worries that he or she might cut the wrong wire or put something in the wrong spot. What could go wrong?

A well-designer graphical user interface, in contrast, at least gives users some choices to explore. Their options are organized in a way that makes some sense. Once they understand a few common idioms, such as an 'X' on the top right corner of a window meaning close, they can reapply that knowledge to other applications running on the operating system. Help systems and documentation are relatively easily accessible. Their files are presented to them with meaningful icons that makes skimming through folders faster.

CLIs are better suited to technical tasks. You are right that knowing the right command can make accomplishing some tasks much faster, but the trick is knowing those commands. People trained in systems administration or software development have learned how to work with this environment as a matter of course; they are more comfortable with using the man pages or searching the Internet for the answer they need. They understand benefits like automation through shell scripting and makefiles and the use of piping the output from one command to the input of another, and they use these things regularly. For nontechnical users, the steep learning curve does not justify the relatively little benefit they will get out of it.

NeantHumain I second your post. I have used the command line (I grew up on DOS) but for some tasks a GUI works & for others CLI works. Example trying to delete directory in Ubuntu using GUI gives permission denied but using CLI (sudo rm -rf directory) works. In addition there are command line references for Linux, Windows & Mac OS X available online

I learned on DOS too...so a command line doesn't frighten me.

I think people just get comfortable with what is familiar to them.

If they had to use command lines more often it wouldn't be such a big deal.

My husband had trouble getting to a directory the other day becasue he couldn't figure out the truncated name for the directory...it had a space in it. I said um..take out the space? Or drag the folder into the command line?

So funny