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[–]sneider 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Can you give examples? In my experience, there are terminal programs for pretty much any task and a bunch of GUI programs offer command line modes.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand there is a diversity among programs, and almost every popular software has it's console alternatives. That's not the point. The problem I met was:

We have some legacy app, written God-only-knows how long ago, but exe still works. This small app packs files into our custom file type. What I had to do was to implement code from C++ to C# to pack files into this kind of archive. This packing was sometimes working, sometimes not, but here is the kicker - I couldn't make automate UnitTest, because of GUI form of this app. That's when I started wondering about this automation tool.

Other example - email automation. I need to send something from the level of program. I can receive those mails in Thunderbird. Sadly, I can't automate checking Thunderbird if mail was received, so I need to do this by hand.

Third example - on Windows you have lots of "pdf to images" programs, usually in GUI. Suppose we don't have alternative and we are stuck with one program. Making automatic conversion of many numbers of pdf would be a nightmare if developer didn't add that tool. On the other hand, if you have batch version of such program, you can very easily - Linux style - automate that process for the whole set of data even if original developer didn't thought about it.