

I heard this somewhere: “You’re in an IVF clinic. It’s on fire and you enter a burning room. On a table is a large cooler with 5 thousand fertilized eggs, and there’s also a crying, injured five-year-old girl in the room. Which one do you save? You can only save one.” The answer for most people is obviously the 5 year old and it’s not a hard choice.
One of the things that first made me fall in love with the cli was how fast doing things like this was. GUIs are hard, and can crash or use up resources for all sorts of different reasons wholly unrelated to the primary task you are trying to accomplish. Once I got over the learning curve of using the cli (and to be fair I’m still in the process of getting truly comfortable with it) I was able to do things so much faster and with less frustration.
Of course, I also don’t want to neglect that it’s not just a matter of the command line but just how good Linux is in this regard. Windows has a command line too and I hate using that thing.