command line

Using the command line doesn’t make you a purist

Lately I’ve been watching David Davis’s Train Signal video on vSphere while exercising at the gym, which has been beneficial on multiple levels. One of the points he makes in the vSphere Management Options video is that the vSphere graphical user interface (GUI) client is used 99% of the time for managing the environment.  I couldn’t agree more — I have multiple shortcuts to different versions of the client on my desktop — it truly is a great tool.  Yet, we still have that 1% of tasks that the GUI just cannot accommodate, for which we must use command-line tools at the Service Console.

In my experience with desktop support many people become so used to GUIs that they don’t want to consider any command line work, even for basic things like running ipconfig at the MS DOS prompt. Others feel that only purists use command line tools, bringing to mind a Hollywood image of some genius hacker hunched over a keyboard, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, writing code in a bunch of terminal windows in his own compiled operating system. Alas, that is not always the case (sometimes it’s take out Chinese boxes).

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