yes. Also, people are so thrown by complexity, that they assume they aren't capable of taking steps toward figuring something out. a CLI really is NOT that hard. They all follow a very simple pattern:
[command] [parameters]
$ ls
just a one word command. shows you directory contents. easy. not complicated looking. Lets make it harder.
$ ls -a
an option. list contents of directory. but ALL of them. still easy.
building from the ground up is easy. For some reason, people still are scared off. Why? Why are people afraid to learn?
It's easy to sight of just how much things you must know just to use the command line. When I read you comment I wondered what other options were available, so I tried...
$ls -h
This is what I've seen with most command line tools, but it doesn't work. So then I tried...
Oh, cool, a list of the options, finaly. Now, let's see what ls -a does:
> -a Include directory entries whose names begin with a dot (.).
If I were looking for invisible files I'd have absolutely no idea this is the option I need to use.
Now, I completely understand that the power of the command line relies on its consistency, I'm confident that—at some point—I'm going to be able to grasp it's elegance. But, for now, I feel like a foreigner in a new country who just knows a few phrases and struggles greatly to understand what is being said to me. Saying that the command line is easy is like saying that English is easy.
> Saying that the command line is easy is like saying that English is easy.
Well, right now it's as if we didn't teach English (or, rather, any foreign language) in schools and then somehow 'magically' expected people to pick up the single most important foreign language for communicating in modern life.
No, it's not easy, but the basics are really not hard to learn if started early and kept up consistently. Just like any other skill that we teach in schools.
But that's only if you try to learn by prodding and poking it. When I started learning English, I didn't begin by reading the definitions of a word in a dictionary. I read manuals that explained the basics in a way that didn't assume prior knowledge.
In the same way, searching for "how can I learn to use the command line" gives you a bunch of guides - of varying quality, of course - that explain the basic commands in a clearer way.
[command] [parameters]
$ ls
just a one word command. shows you directory contents. easy. not complicated looking. Lets make it harder.
$ ls -a
an option. list contents of directory. but ALL of them. still easy.
building from the ground up is easy. For some reason, people still are scared off. Why? Why are people afraid to learn?