The last few (work)days have been a blast back to my DOS past--at least in the sense of being very script-oriented. (The similarities end there. My first computer, an 8-bit Epson 8088, was powered by two 5.25" floppy drives and was certainly not networked.) I've had the luxury of a web-based interface to the MySQL database, but otherwise all interaction with this new server has been via SSH, SCP, and SFTP. White text on the black background of a command-prompt, in other words.
Threading through the maze of branches of a file system (in the case of SFTP, on the client- as well as server-side) definitely requires a bit more presence of mind than a "windowed" UI. Particularly when you need to make sure you're not uploading Beta code to a Production system...or vice-versa. Then there's the fact that misspelling anything will generate an error message. And in a Unix-based system, that means even perfectly matching the capitalisation.
But oddly, the lack of a pretty UI over the top of those interactions is oddly reassuring. When I launch a script via a command-line and collect its output from a log file, I feel like I can trust what it's telling me. Ditto when keeping an eye on the system processes after a scheduled (a.k.a. "cron") job launches. Maybe it's just that I was "raised" on the command-line. Or maybe it's the fact that *nix doesn't try to protect its users from their own fumble-fingering or short attention spans.
Either way, I appreciate the straight-talk. Normally, I distrust truth rendered in terms of black-and-white. But this is definitely an exception.
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* I'm riffing on the Latin "in vino veritas," which translates as, "In wine, [there is] truth."
