CLI Roadmap

Sun Oct 14 18:29:10 UTC 2012

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Rodrick Brown <rodrick.brown at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 14, 2012, at 1:42 PM, Kasper Adel <karim.adel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have never used any CLI other than Cisco so i am curious what useful and
>> creative knobs and bolts are available for other network appliance Vendors.
>
> Eh??
>
>>
>> I guess what makes *NIX CLI/Shell so superior is that you can advanced
>> stuff from the CLI using sed, awk and all the great tools there so maybe
>> this is also one thing missing.
>
> Unix philosophy says a program should do only one thing and do it
> well. The Unix shell/CLI allows one to solve problems by sewing
> together a sequence of small, specialized programs by piping the
> output of a simple shell command to another shell command to solve
> problems.
>

this is correct. however, baring the utilities, the unix shells are so
far ahead of most appliances and windows cmd. my zsh does
autocompletion of program parameters, hosts in the hosts file,
directories over scp, etc. i know what type of repo i'm in and if
git/hg, i know what branch as it is put in my path with a zle script.
my autocomplete is case insensitive as well and i have a visual
representation of options i can tab through when i autocomplete.

if there is a hardware vendor that doesn't use *nux that is at this
level, i'd sure like to know. as it is, i think that good kernels
(along with the rest of the stack) are so hard to develop that i don't
hardware vendors are likely to want to put much money into developing
their own anymore when nice choices are available for free. ie, vyatta
(though i disagree with them using linux over bsd because of the
network stack)