Command Line Media / "Media Bashing" ==================================== Source: http://automatist.net/techdaze/2009_102 Licence: Creative Common Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands While the command line, or shell, is a text-based interface, this does not mean that manipulating other kinds of media, image, sound, video, is excluded. Far from it, many command line tools offer extremely useful and uniquely powerful functionality difficult to achieve with GUI programs. In addition, by applying the basics of pipelining and abstraction (through creating your own scripts with parameters), the command line enables highly particular and personal media tools to be created by pulling existing tools together in novel ways. Considering the difference between graphical / interactive software and textual / non-interactive, you could compare: Graphique/Interactive | Command Line/Non-interactive ---------------------- | ---------------------------- The GIMP ou Photoshop | imagemagick Firefox | Wget Cinelerra ou Final Cut | FFMPEG So the difference is not simply whether a program uses graphics or not -- Command-line programs are designed to perform a very specific task, and typically are specified textually according to a strict syntax (command-line options, etc.) They are non-interactive in the sense that you start them up, they do their thing, and you get the result -- you don't typically influence them while they are running. However, you often can work interactively with these programs through cycles of making changes to a script, running it, observing the result and repeating.