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Ken-Young's Avatar
Posts: 387 | Thanked: 1,700 times | Joined on Feb 2010 @ Cambridge, MA, USA
#2
Originally Posted by dagoss View Post
Sometimes I'm using my phone, and I stop and say to myself "holy shat on a hot tin roof, there's a terminal on my phone!" The novelty amuses me, but short of using apt, vim, MC, and the occasional game of unnethack, I rarely use it.

Still though—there's a terminal on my phone. That's so neat.

I've only bricked my n900 once, so obviously I need to start using the command prompt more. What awesome or useful things (preferably both, but awesome and useless is acceptable) can the terminal be used for on the n900? Can I place phone calls with a command? Are there some CLI programs that are simply useful or do something that isn't replicated easily in the GUI?
Well, managing packages with apt-get is WAY faster than using any of the GUI tools to download code (even FAM). Running python interactively provides a very fancy pocket calculator. If you install ssh you can log into remote workstations (if that appeals to you). And of course you have access to the usual Unix-style utilities like awk, find, grep et al. which make managing the files on your phone far easier (IMHO) than using any GUI filemanager. You can manually optify things by creating soft links.
 

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