63
What's your favorite well-designed CLI and why?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
63 points (97.0% liked)
Linux
63789 readers
869 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I like CLI tools that everything I need can be found in a short
command --helpcall, if I don't need to useman commandit's even better.I've used poor CLI tools for example
adbyou type this and you get almost a scientific article with more than 100 flags to use. No I don't want to need to usegrep.A good one would be
pacmanit separates clearly what it does instead of shoving it all in a single command.Pacman flags not being idempotent (-SS, yy, uu and such existing) is so unbelievably horrible that I can't use arch just because of it.
I've never used Arch, can you explain how it behaves?
The flag -y refreshes the package list (like apt update). For some reason, you use the flag -yy to force it to clear the whole package list and redownload everything.
To allow package downgrades when upgrading you use -uu.
These are very commonly suggested fixes to arch package management problems, for example when you leave your arch install to suit for too long, it will be impossible to update it because of dependency problems. So you google it and people are saying to run "pacman -SSyyuu" or other such commands.
Those additional options should be their own flags, command line flags should be idempotent (it should flip a switch on, doing it multiple times shouldn't change anything).
Okay yeah that's terrible
This is where a man page comes in but alas, but some (perhaps even most) of them are fucking horrible. The core incantation is either too dumbed-down or (more often) too long-winded.
Some good ones I can praise are netcat, ghostscript and 7z. Special praise goes to the Library Funtions Manual entries like signal and exit.
Bad ones ones in my book are vim (too short), ffmpeg (a simple reordering of sections would make it quite a bit better, like moving the less common flags lower down the page) and git starts of strong but ends up being way too detailed and unstructured.
I could go listing examples for days, so I might as well stop now.