I’ve been mostly a Windows user my whole life up to this point. That was due mostly to fate. My parents had only PCs (unless you count the TI-99/4A), so not being of much economic independence at the age of 5, those are what I used too. I suppose there were computer days at elementary school too, where we used Apple 2es, but all we really learned on those was how to boot up Oregon Trail.

At university I got exposure to Linux. I had grown used to graphical interfaces by that point, so harkening back to command-line days was odd. I never caught Linux myself though, being turned off to the OS because I couldn’t stand that average Linux user that I met. Their arrogance and support for Linux seemed to stem from the simple fact that it isn’t Windows, so it must be better. That’s like saying that puke isn’t feces, so it’s good to eat. Or like saying that voting for Obama is good, because he isn’t Bush.

Anyway, the Linuzealots would extol the command line and how much easier it was to get things done. Maybe they enjoy sifting through man pages. Now don’t get me wrong, I like technical challenges– that’s why I’m a programmer. I don’t like figuring out how to use cryptic and poorly-documented tools though. I like accomplishing things.

If the command line is so great, why is it so hard to remove (or delete if you’re a Windows user) a non-empty directory from the command line? I can NEVER remember the switch for doing so. I just googled it a second ago, and thought I got somewhere, but when I typed -r in (what the result claimed the switch was) it started prompting me on every file. Grrr! So I just typed “open .” and deleted it graphically.

When you consider the time it took to do that and then come rant about it here, well, I just don’t think the command line is all that more efficient/productivity enhancing.

Of course, if I ever get a technical reader who could tell me what the blooming flag is, feel free to post it! That is fact what I was really hoping to do– figure it out and then post it here so I would know where to look the next time.

Edit: I have since found out that it’s rm -Rf that I wanted.