[rescue] Adminning and the CLI

[Steve Sandau]

> in both solaris and red hat, there are "things" that cannot be accomplished
> in the gui that can easily be accomplished on the command line.
> the gui tools are the publisher's attempts to satisfy the customer's demands
> for a system that is cheaper to maintain.
> that is, pointy-clicky guys are always cheaper than cli guys.

And beyond admin tasks, the Unix command line environment with tools 
like grep, awk, sed, cut and so on (no to mention loops on the command 
line) is so infinitely flexible that you can do amazing things on one 
line that you could never do in a GUI without programming your own.

As a really simple example, I was testing WebLogic servers response 
times recently, two servers each on four boxes. I used something like:

for server in 192.168.10.1 192.168.10.2 192.168.10.3 192.168.10.4
   do
     for port in 8001 8002
       do
         time wget http://$server:$port/ > /dev/null 2>&1
       done
   done

to check how long it took each server to give up its login page. I have 
no idea how I would do that in any other way without way more effort and 
less flexibility.

As I said to the auditor working with me a few weeks ago, while I was 
showing him what kinds of info we could extract from logs, Unix is just 
so cool...

Steve