“Prebuilt into macOS and Unix systems (…) the command line (also called the shell) is a powerful text-based interface in which users issue terse instructions to create, find, sort and manipulate files, all without using the mouse. There are actually several distinct (…) shell systems, among the most popular of which [sic?] is Bash, an acronym for the ‘Bourne again shell’ (a reference to the Bourne shell, which it replaced in 1989).”
An hilarious rediscovery of the joys of shell (line) commands in Nature! Which I use by default for most operations on my computer, albeit far from expertly (despite the use of a cheat tee, from time to time!). One of the arguments in the article, “The mouse doesn’t scale,” is definitely mine as well. Among other marketing lines, wrangling files with no software interference (check), handling huge files (very rarely), manipulating spreadsheets (I don’t), parallelising work on remote servers (check), automate via cron (not anymore)…. Unsurprisingly, most of our students are never using terminals of command lines.
s I had delayed my ugrade of my Ubuntu 16.04 Linux OS way beyond the reasonable, I eventually found myself forced to do it in the least favourable version earlier this week, as the University was closed and my computer support friends were on (well-deserved) vacation. Indeed, my graphical interface went blank and no amount of rebooting was making any change, while I had access to a line editor which was kindly suggesting the command for the upgrade. After a moment of hesitation, I followed the recommendation and prepared for either a long wait or a tragic error message, but nothing like that happened in that the download of the new version was lightning fast and the upgrade itself lasted less than one hour, leaving me with a fully operational 18.04 version. And amazed at recovering my earlier tuning, with even better performances..! (The only glitch is that the colours seem to have turned more reddish or auberginish.) One worry I had with using a 
