[burfog]

It doesn't seem needed because you aren't used to what you can do with it. If you were good at it, you'd be horrified at the thought of not having that capability.

It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one.

A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.

[wingerlang]

I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user).

I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing.

But I agree, I use automation/scripting/bash every day and would be horrified to loose this ability. But I also know other developer who doesn't use it at all.

[Morgawr]

>I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user).

I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it.

Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.

[wingerlang]

I know it is common, but I think they would still use some GUI tool or get help from a friend.

I am very comfortable in the terminal but I'd still /prefer/ a GUI tool.