Quoting Peter Ross (petrosssit@gmail.com):
In my case my "rpm and FreeBSD infested brain" was on holidays and was about to update the only "apt-get driven" system I have around at the moment. So, what is the command line tool I have to learn?
The one that would suffice is apt-get. It would be good to also be aware of dpkg, which is to apt-get what rpm is to yum. And how would you know that? By ten minutes looking at pretty much any new-admin tutorial for any deb-based Linux (or Illumos) distribution.
A lot of command line tools, and technologies, vary over time, and not only between distributions and Unix flavours. I am still used to ifconfig but a minimal install under Red Hat does not even has it.
1. You can have it very easily if you insist. 2. Red Hat omits the net-tools utilities (that include ifconfig) in favour of the iproute2 utilities because the former have been unmaintained for almost 16 years, and also lack some functionality. http://inai.de/2008/02/19 https://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/deprecated-linux-networking-comm... http://andys.org.uk/bits/2010/02/24/iproute2-life-after-ifconfig/ At this point, complaining about excessive tool churn because ifconfig is slowly fading away is like complaining that nobody installs BIND4 or lpd or wu-ftpd any more.
On top of it, I know how many users baulk if you give them a terminal.
Traumatic growing up, isn't it? ;->
Just instruct a stereotypical office worker over the phone to open the command line under Windows.
I'm sorry, weren't we talking about "novice users" (which you put in scare quotes to indicate the ironic nature of your reference) needing to resort to apt-get rather than a DE-based graphical package-operations tool? Thus, you were speaking of a root-account-using system administrator. So, why are you suddenly changing the subject to 'a stereotypical office worker', Peter? That having been said, if a 'stereotyical office worker' mentioned to me that a graphical tool in his or her corporate Linux desktop machine was giving strange and flaky results, I would indeed reply that console equivalents have the advantages cited. If the person then said he/she didn't wish to use them, I would sincerely wish that person luck with all future efforts, then turn away to more fruitful pursuits elsewhere (such as teaching people willing to learn).
So, you already scare 50+% of the population away with your advice.
You say that as if it were somehow _my_ problem.
There was Nextstep.
I loved NeXTStep. Very nice for a proprietary BSD. Pity what happened to it. ;-> And when you wanted to do serious text processing, file operations, etc., on NeXTStep, you used standard console tools. I certainly did, as did all other NeXTStep users I ever met, back in the day.
I have not touched MacOS X for a while but the spirit seems to live there.
No, it really, _really_ does not. Take it from an old NeXTStep user whose wife spent many years under Steve Jobs as an Apple coder, it absolutely does not.
I also loved AIX's smitty.
Never been smitten by SMIT, myself.