Do Not Fear the Command Line

Do Not Fear the
Command Line
You Are Smarter Than It
 Peter Chittum, Developer Evangelist
 @pchittumThames Valley DG
5 April, 2017

Forward-Looking Statements
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 This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or
if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the
forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any
projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies
or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology
developments and customer contracts or use of our services.
 The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new functionality for
our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of
growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any litigation, risks associated with completed
and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand,
retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history
reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could
affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly
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Any Computer User
You Want To Use Command Line
You Are Not Sure Where to Start
Who are you?

Not an exhaustive "How To"
How command line apps work
Understand what you can do
A Small Taste of Salesforce DX
What to Expect

Overview of Command Lines
How Commands Work
More Powerful Stuﬀ
Salesforce CLIs
Where To Go Next (git, npm, brew, grep)

A Brief History of User Interfaces

This is my laptop.
There are many like it,
but this one is mine.

Pros
Pros and Cons of Command Lines
Low Resource Usage
Concise and Powerful
Expert Friendly
Automate with Scripting
Cons
Unintuitive
Commands not Obvious
Not Visually Rich
Beginner Unfriendly

A few obvious statements follow…

The command line executes
commands

Commands are little apps
You write them instead of clicking on them.

Overview of Command Lines
How Commands Work
More Powerful Stuﬀ
Salesforce CLIs
Where To Go Next

How a command works
Input
(STDIN, FILE)
Output
(STDOUT)

Sound familiar?
0013000000rqYCC
CASESAFEID()
0013000000rqYCCAA2

There are also parameters
Input Output
Parameters

Semicolon: Do one thing ; then do another
;

Only do the seccond if the ﬁrst one works correctly
&&

Pipe: Take the output from the ﬁrst thing and send it to the second
|

Redirect: Take the output from the first thing and write to a file
(Careful…this wipes the previous contents of the file)
>

Append: Take the output from the ﬁrst thing and write to the end of a ﬁle
>>

bash (Windows 10)
cygwin
cmd
powershell
What if I'm using Windows?

Demo
Files, Folders, Input, Output

alias
Create a shortcut for a more complicated command

cat, head, tail
Meow…
Just kidding...diﬀerent ways to read a ﬁle

dog
Just kidding…there is no dog...unless you make an alias called "dog"
Then dog does whatever you tell it to do…
...good dog

wc
Not the loo…
word count
counts stuﬀ

grep
Search in ﬁles
(global regular expression print)

sed
Modify data in a stream
(stream editor)

awk
Basic programming language for Unix systems
(not an acronym, and not covering today…)

curl
Web request
(Windows has iwr)

> curl https://blixtar-dev-ed.my.salesforce.com/services/data/
v39.0/query?q=SELECT+Id,Name+FROM+Account+LIMIT+1 -H
'Authorization: Bearer 00D24000000IwtW!
AQ4AQMiGG9NfUlO5njwZpODWCazHSUFRgM26olREehLfu9GPqq1JWSTxwUfgncjd
ET.13_G0dPm5SobOPuj_F0.vvlU9Ih44'
{"totalSize":1,"done":true,"records":[{"attributes":
{"type":"Account","url":"/services/data/v39.0/sobjects/Account/
001240000050EByAAM"},"Id":"001240000050EByAAM","Name":"DVLA"}]}
The trouble with curl

force-cli
Open source CLI project
Toolbelt for talking to Salesforce's APIs

Salesforce DX CLI
Replaces force-cli. Fully supported cli tool.
Currently in Pilot

Lightning CLI
Static Code Analysis for Lightning Components

Heroku CLI
Formerly Heroku toolbelt
Now a part of Salesforce DX CLI

Windows is case insensitive
Unix ﬁle permissions
sudo versus Run As Administrator
Mac/Unix v Windows

Powershell, CMD, cygwin (Windows shells)
Z shell (popular powerful Unix shell)
Package managers (brew, chocolatey, npm)
Automating (cron, shell scripts)
Source Control (git)
Task Runners (gulp, grunt, …)
awk (Unix programming language)
REPLs (interactive mode programming)
All the other stuﬀ

Brief History of Command Lines
http://bit.ly/brief-history-cmd-lines
Windows and Unix Command Line Equivalents:
http://bit.ly/win2unixcmd

My Stuﬀ:
slideshare.net/chittum
salesforce.quip.com/rFA0Af9rhUza

Do Not Fear the Command Line

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