Things I Use CLI Rather Than GUI For

Today I am sharing the things I do not use or do not like to use graphical user interface(GUI) instead I stick to command line. I use the following commands instead of their graphical counterpart as the command line way is faster and easier.


1) Combine MP3 files(songs)
I frequently combine mp3 files into a single one to hear what I record in my laptop. The cat command is enough to combine two or more MP3 files into a single one. Below is a sample command:

cat input1.mp3 input2.mp3 > output.mp3

2) Monitor Memory Usage
I usually find myself typing top command in the terminal instead of opening system monitor when I need to see what is clogging up my CPU. I also use powertop command to view power consumption of my laptop so that I can get suggestions to increase the battery life.

3) Resize images
This is another thing I use command line instead of GUI, for. I find using the mogrify and convert commands from imagemagick packages easier than graphical interface esp. when I need to batch resize the images to a specified size. Please refer to my blog post in these commands.

4) Video Conversion Using ffmpeg
I frequently convert the videos using the commandline ffmpeg utility. The general syntax is quite easier to remember. An example below will clarify things.

ffmpeg -i inputvideo.mp4 outputvideo.avi

Play with different video formats as per your requirement.

5) Edit Text Files
I usually find myself opening nano editor while editing the text files. Of course, using the lightweight GUI tools like gedit would be more easier and reliable. However, maybe due to the fact that I work a lot of times over SSh, I find using nano to edit textual files.

nano file.txt

6) Install Softwares and Perform Updates and Upgrades
Whenever I need to install a software, or perform updates and upgrades, I am used to with the command line apt-get utility.

Install a software package

sudo apt-get install package1 package2 ... packagen

Perform release upgrade

sudo do-release-upgrade

7) Mirror A Website
Mirroring a website is a lot easier with wget command and I frequently use this. The simplest form is as below but be sure to check the MAN page and help for wget command to know more options available.

wget -mk -w 4 http://www.site.com/

In the above example, m means mirror and k refers to local hyperlinking and w is for maintaing proper delay time so that the remote server does not get overloaded.

So these are some of the stuffs I like to do using command line rather than GUI. Share yours...