A Final Word

As you can see, the shell is very comprehensive and using it effectively is a matter of practice. In this relatively long chapter, we have only mentioned a few of the available commands: Mandrake Linux has thousands of utilities, and even the most experienced users do not make use of them all.

There are utilities for all tastes and purposes: you have utilities for handling images (like convert mentioned above, but also GIMP batch mode and all pixmap handling utilities), sound (Ogg Vorbis encoders, audio CD players), CD writing, e-mail clients, FTP clients and even web browsers (like lynx or links), not to mention all the administration tools.

Even if graphical applications with equivalent functions do exist, they are usually graphical interfaces built around these very same utilities. In addition, command-line utilities have the advantage of being able to operate in non-interactive mode: you can start writing a CD and then log off the system with the confidence that the writing will take place (see the nohup(1) man page or the screen(1) man page).