What are the Benefits & Drawbacks of a Command Line Interface?

jcw150 · January 20, 2016

As above.

Thanks

Mojo-Jojo · January 20, 2016

Some tools are only ever available fully through the commandline. Most have GUI frontends which in the backend still use command line commands.

I think mostly these days, Command Line interfaces are easily accessible for programmers to develop GUIs for. It also allows for some modularity when programming a tool: you can fit actual program functionality in a command line interface tool, and distribute that. Then various people can develop their own GUI for it.

An abvious drawback is of course the overwhelming amount of options and (for beginners) non-intuitive way of working.

LukeTim · January 20, 2016

I find the command line to be faster and more productive. I am more focused on what I am doing in a CLI vs GUI. It is a lot more powerful too. Doing batch operations on files (e.g. maybe renaming 100 files) by hand in a GUI is tedious. In CLI you can script it up and just run it.

Plus, there's something about scripting and running programs in the command line and seeing all the text print out that for some reason I find more exciting.

Drawbacks are pretty obvious. Less intuitive, steep learning curve etc.

January 20, 2016

If a GUI and CLI have the same feature set, there is no advantage to using a CLI as it will be more time consuming and more difficult to use than a GUI.

However most things don't have full functionality via GUI (Cisco and Ubiquti to name just 2). CLI also makes more money for the product vendor. Think about it this way - if you didn't have to complete CCNA or CCNP to be able to correctly use a Cisco router, why would you do the cert?