What CLI app are you addicted to?

[psych-major]

Anyone with more than 5 minutes exposure to Linux knows that the console rules. However, regardless of your desktop manager preference, there are also a huge number of extremely well-written GUI apps for just about everything you would ever want to do.

So the question is this:

What's one thing you routinely accomplish via the CLI, when there's a perfectly good GUI tool for it? The reasons can be that it's faster in the CLI, more predicatble, or just plain cool from a geek point of view.

For me it's Mp3 playback. xmms is an excellent Mp3 player, but I use mpg123 for playback and alsamixer for volume. Here's why:
-I have two workstations in my office, a Dell laptop that is generally booted to WinXP
-I have a desktop that runs on Slackware 10.1. It's a spare workstation, file server, cd-burner, and reason to keep Linux active in the office.
-Mp3's are stored on the laptop
-I have the Mp3 folder on the laptop shared and mounted on the 'nix box via samba
-I use PuTTY to open 2 SSH terminals from the laptop to the Linux box.
-One session runs alsamixer -s for volume
-The other runs mpg123 to play Mp3's or radio.

My reasons are 1) coolness and 2) I offload the Mp3 playing from my laptop and don't have to reach around to my other desk to manipulate playback or volume.

So now you know my dark CLI addiction. What's yours?

[cybertron]

Definitely MPlayer. It's so easy just to do "mplayer filename" at a console when I want to check whether something I'm doing with a multimedia file is working. I use it a lot with my DVD rips and captures from a DV camera.

Edit: But I do still use the GUI when I'm actually going to watch something all the way through. I like having a slider bar for seeking

[ph34r]

Ok, so besides the actual shell (bash) there are all those little utils for doing shell scripting. That and wget, especially the version I compiled after removing the checks for /robots.txt

[IsaacKuo]

vi. I use it only because it's what I'm used to. And the fact that it's not emacs.

[serz]

Originally posted by IsaacKuo
vi. I use it only because it's what I'm used to.

Ditto. wget as well! heh.

[drummerboy195]

Ditto on the mplayer. Great app, and it plays everything under the sun.

[leonpmu]

chown & chmod -R, must faster on the CLI, GUI sometimes bails out on large directories.

vi, cat, tail. All much cooler and faster from the cli.

ifconfig - chanign an IP addy easily, also to check the exisiting addy...

[JayMan8081]

chmod and vi
I agree with leonpmu that chmod from the CLI is often quicker and easier than selecting a lot of files or directories. And for quick edits I can fire up vi, make the change, save and close before a lot of GUI text editors would probably open.

[sharth]

pine...vim...wget...

[retsaw]

Mplayer, I do have Xine installed for when I want a GUI control or need proper dvd menu support though. You don't really need a slider for seeking when mplayer has three sets of buttons for seeking in different increments.

mpc, for controlling mpd (music player deamon), but I also have the foxytunes extension for controlling mpd when I have Firefox open.

mkisofs/cdrecord/growisofs, for burning cds/dvds, I don't actually have any GUI apps for these.

"xset dpms force off" to make my monitors go into standby quickly (most useful for when I go to bed)

pacman (Arch Linux's package manager)

I do use the CLI for loads of other stuff aswell, in fact aside from web browsing, checking my email and ripping CDs there is very little that I don't actually use the CLI for at some point or other, though for other things whether I use GUI or CLI depends on my mood.

[bwkaz]

Email. I use Thunderbird at home (when I have X, on my client machine), but when at work all I have is an ssh session. Plus my server (which is what I ssh to) doesn't have X installed, so while I could tunnel an X connection through it, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

So I fire up mutt instead.

[madcompnerd]

Either bash or gcc.

[CoffeeMan]

vim, gcc, sftp, ssh, mplayer, wget, emerge

[dannybunkins]

mplayer and pico, I could use kwrite but using pico is just so much cooler.

[bburton]

I'll put my vote in for ls. Seriously, I'm addicted to it. I don't see how I could live without it. I use it all the time!