this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Programming
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Ultimately it helps to understand the benefit of the command line: That text is a more effective mechansim for communicating that anything else. That any command you learn can easily to turned into a script an automated. That commands can be copied and pasted and shared with friends much easier than videos or images. Knowing it's benefit motivates you to learn it.
Look at the explanation in Windows for how to change a registry key or how to change a printer setting. It's one long guide full of screenshots thats painful to follow or understand. Where-as Linux users can easily share commands and fixes or tests over a simple irc chat, because the command line reaches the whole system.
The command line is of course a place where lots of apps can be plugged together and mixed up to achieve hundreds of goals, and thus learning awk, grep, sed, wc means you can count, search or perform regexes on any other part of the system, from counting users, or essays, to network connections, or processes or anything.
To be honest, many existing blogs answer exactly this question, which has been asked a million times before.
I agree with most of what you said, except for the Windows examples. The pages that you linked begin with three-line TL;DRs that are enough for any barely-competent user to find and modify the necessary settings. While the full instructions may be tortuously detailed, are they actually hard to understand?
And sure, those Windows pages don't advance the user's knowledge in any meaningful way, but neither does blindly copying and pasting a line of shell commands.
By the way, while I appreciate that we're talking about if and how CLI is superior to GUI, and not Linux versus Windows...
... both of those tasks can be done via CLI in Windows, too. I am very happy that I switched to Linux, but there's no reason to misrepresent the other guys.