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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.