This is tangential to your very relevant comment, but FYI, a command line is somewhere you type a command (a 'line of code') and it executes as if it was in the middle of a running program.
Very useful when you want to see or confirm how somethig works. Type it and press 'Enter'. It comes with the python installation, and it's commonly called Interactive Interpreter.
Thanks for the comment, I know what a command line is, I just find it incredibly confusing and unintuitive. To exemplify here are a few of the problems I run into when faced with a command line:
- what can I do here? There are no tips, clues, or any other way of knowing what to write. The answer often given is that there are MAN pages, help files, etc. that you can bring up by typing more cryptic commands. I just don't have the motivation to sift through a whole bunch of documents that may or may not have the answer I'm looking for.
- On a windows machine CLI doesn't work out of the box. I need to install cygwin, configure it, and do all sorts of stuff I don't know about and don't care about.
- I get no feedback. When I've typed some cryptic command into the commandline and hit enter I'm presented with a prompt. Maybe everything went well, maybe it didn't. Maybe I now have a virus since I found the cryptic command somewhere on the Internet. i just don't know.
- I can't undo stuff. When I type a command and then find out it was wrong, I have no obvious way of undoing it.
The point isn't that command lines are bad, on the contrary it's quite obvious that it's a really powerful tool. It just has a steep learning curve, and not all people are interested in spending the time it takes to master it just to get a wordpress installation up and running.
The point is more that it's hard for experts to see why it's so hard to just type 'grep -lsm (er /:rt) disc -f' to make the computer magically do something. There are a whole lot of assumptions that take years to master before you can type a command like that and not have your heart skip a beat when you hit enter.
And that's okay, it's why good hackers are worth a lot of money. The majority of people however, just want that wordpress blog to work.
Very useful when you want to see or confirm how somethig works. Type it and press 'Enter'. It comes with the python installation, and it's commonly called Interactive Interpreter.