When Is a Command-Line Application Not?

It sometimes seems that every time I dive into a Youtube video promising “${N} Awesome CLI Applications” (or equivalent), that most of the suggested applications are not command-line applications. They’re TUI-applications – text user interface as opposed to graphical user interface – or to align with my bad habit of referring to GUI applications as gooey applications, perhaps tooey applications.

Now there’s nothing wrong with tooey applications; I use them every day. Especially nmon (just because I got used to it before I discovered htop). Or btop

But none of these are really command-line applications; by which I mean they aren’t used at the command-line even if they are (optionally) invoked there. A command-line application allows you to use the shell including pipes to produce an aggregate result. For example :-

» grep mike /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $5}'
Mike Meredith

That uses two command-line “applications” to turn a username (“mike”) into a full name (“Mike Meredith”). Yes it can be optimised into a single command :-

» awk -F: '/^mike:/ {print $5}' /etc/passwd
Mike Meredith

… which even improves the search, but makes the point less well. And we can do slightly fancier things too :-

(don’t assume that QR code takes you somewhere nice)

I’m not suggest Youtubers should stop making videos about terminal-based applications; I’m not even suggesting they should concentrate on “proper” command-line applications. Just don’t call terminal-based applications “command-line” because they really are not.