| > worst command-line interfaces If you mean TUI wise as in curses, nearly all of them. Command line parameters however, there are so many examples. Tar, unrar and unzip take the cake, all in the same category of tools. "unrar x" whatever it is, I always have to look it up. dd because of the way its parameters are specified: dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.bar bs=4096 count=1024 . It's all historical and I can live with it, but many of them at least have the saving grace that they have excellent manpages or you've used them so often it becomes second nature. There should be a special place in hell for tools that combine short and long style command line options with a single dash. Like "foo -b a -r -baz 123" with "-baz" being a single option, because I will automatically add an extra dash there out of habit. Coworkers discovering ncurses or some library around it tend to go on a TUI frenzy for a while, and it inevitably ends up being some convoluted mess nobody wants to use. I'll admit there's a few indispensable curses based tools, for instance top (and some variants along that line), but they're far and few in between. At most dialog comes to mind for dealing with prompts for end users, but I personally abhor it in anything but a setup or installation context. Those very same coworkers also make tools with indecipherable command line options, often because they don't know the language they're working in has a standardized option parser library or module. > best I don't remember which tool it was, it could be "crm" (for failover, think like heartbeat and pacemaker) but I might be mistaken. It's been years since I've used it. The command line had options like so: tool [options] section action resource_src resource_tgt But the best part was, if you just started the tool without any options, it'd drop you into a pseudo-shell. It'd show you a blank prompt ending in ">". If you then typed "section" you'd end up with a "section>" prompt. I remember for what I was doing with it, it felt really intuitive. At any point I could type "help section" and it'd list the available actions for that section, together with short example. I've forgotten the real syntax, but you'd have commands like: tool node status tool node standby servername tool service stop dns tool service migrate dns secondary If you were in the pseudo-shell, you could do: $ service service$ migrate dns secondary service$ up $ node node$ status node$ exit |