[PLUG] Scripts vs GUI

[Dan Herrington]

As someone who's career is built on automation, I agree with all of you :)

A good GUI abstracts more than automates, but that is more pedantic.  Automation is for brain dead, repetitive tasks, as Keith pointed out, but a good GUI, yeah, King Beowulf is right. A picture is worth a thousand words. You can't get a status on the web server farm by reading through scripts.

CLI allows you to build it and keep it working operationally, but the GUIs allow you to manage the higher level complex tasks of assimilating and showing information fast for decision making.

As for SCP, yeah I'd script that.

> On Dec 11, 2016, at 11:51 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 12/10/2016 10:15 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>> ...
>> The power of Unix/Linux is that shell scripts can automate
>> what you do frequently.  
>> ...
> 
>> On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 01:21:21AM -0800, King Beowulf wrote:
>> ...
>> Often a properly designed GUI is quicker and more intuitive that trying
>> to remember and track obscure CLI options stuffed into a script
>> somewhere.  
>> ...
> 
> If you reread what I wrote, it is about making your
> own SHELL SCRIPTS for frequently used tasks.  You
> can connect to your scripts with the command line,
> or you can add a desktop icon, or add an icon to
> the Gnome/KDE menu.  CREATE and AUTOMATE.
> 
> There are tools for capturing and automating mouse
> clicks.  But your desktop icons can move around,
> so that is very fragile. 
> 
> Rich mentions LyX for working with LaTeX, which I have
> tried using.  Too inflexible, too much work to iterate
> towards what I want, too subject to the changing whims
> of GUI re-designers.  My documents are built out of
> segments of other documents, dozens of interations,
> often with other tools (like povray) making some of
> the elements of the complete document.  Concatenating
> documents with shell scripts is easier after iteration
> two, and vital on a tight deadline.
> 
> My dear wife uses the desktop and GUI far more than I
> do;  the icons and documents are piled on top of each
> other on her desktop, and she cannot find anything. 
> Her desktop has meeting minutes from two years ago,
> but she can't use grep to locate what she worked on
> last month.  With grep and text sources, I can find
> meeting minutes from 20 years ago;  more specifically, 
> a document in a specific two week time window 20
> years ago - on half a dozen machines, with different
> distro versions.
> 
> If I put that search in a script, with a few comments,
> I can use it again in the future.  I can rewrite it to
> look for another time window, without needing to
> remember how to use rarely used grep options.  When I
> have many such scripts, I can use grep to find them.
> 
> Simple shell programming (with comments!) is an
> investment in the future.  Some people "organize" their
> information and tasks like they have no future.  They
> work like blue collar assembly line workers, repeating
> the same manual operations over and over until they get
> old and they can't hold their hands steady any more. 
> Or programmers replace them with a robot.  
> 
> Keith
> 
> -- 
> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
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