Does something simple like htop count? I believe there's a bunch of other good stuff that uses ncurses as well.
Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#22Best is probably https://github.com/cli/cli
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#23The ImageMagick utility mogrify. By default (without specifying extra command-line options) it overwrites the input files. [1] In decades of computer use, that is the only command line tool that tricked me into destroying my data because I didn't realize it works differently from all the other tools I use that don't do that. Usually, a command line utility with less options specified is relatively "safe" and you have…
> mogrify - resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. Mogrify overwrites the original image file, whereas, convert(1) writes to a different image file. The whole reason for mogrify's existence is that it overwrites the original image file.
It would be much safer to take the sed approach and put mogrify‘s functionality under `convert -i[backup extension]`, and dispense with standalone mogrify altogether.
Imagine having the command “sedd” aliased to `sed -i`. It would be a usability nightmare.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#24Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
This is a pain in the GUI tools as well
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#25My niggle is with commands that cannot be composed, ie. consumed by other tools or shell scripts or built into pipelines. There are lots of small things that break composition: Not exiting with a non-zero code on error, sending error messages to stdout, not producing output that can be easily parsed by another command. Too many commands suffer from one of these problems, unfortunately.
Honestly that's the drawback of unix-ish interfaces. Don't get me wrong, text first is usually a sane default, but there is also value in an interface like Powershell, where you would write your program as a Cmdlet that returns an object-like response.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#26Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
Relevant xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1168/
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#27Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
Relevant xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1168/
tar -czf ./file.tgz ./*
edit: i do hope that is correct without checking :-)
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#28Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#29Not the worst (I think `tar` and `unzip` probably take the cake) but `find` is pretty atrocious IMO. The order in which you specify certain flags like `-maxdepth` relative to other option flags matters (not just relative to plain arguments, but relative to other option flags starting with `-`).
Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
#30Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
As an alternative to atool I've always used The Unarchiver's cli version[0] which has been able to handle basically anything I've thrown at it correctly.