What exactly is a CLI?

Question

From what I understand, there are several CLI’s. Example:

• Ionic CLI
• Angular CLI
• Cordova CLI

But what exactly is a CLI? It is possible to use these frameworks without the use of these CLI’s?

Answer 1

CLI which means command-line interface (command line interface), it is briefly an interface that supports passing parameters via command line on terminals and/or similar.

In other words, it is a program that accepts parameters to execute commands or even starts a system of I/O (input and output) on the terminal, without finishing the program.

Note that on Unix-like systems the program does not need to be actually an executable, it may be a script that has a program header "interpreter" and so this can work in CLI (globally or not), an example using the /bin/bash create a script called foo:

Note: /bin/bash is the location of the bash executable, this location may vary from system to system What is the difference between /bin/bash and /usr/bin/env bash?

#!/bin/bash

echo "Seu comando:" $1

Then perform:

./foo teste

Will display on the screen:

your test command

Even with PHP it is possible, create a script and call baz:

Note: /usr/bin/php-cgi is the location of the php-cgi executable

#!/usr/bin/php-cgi
<?php
echo 'Seu comando:', $argv[1];

Then perform:

./baz teste

Already in Windows only executable with the extension .exe or scripts .bat, .vbs (among some other script formats that I will enumerate here) can be executed.

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You can use these frameworks without using these CLI’s?

You are likely to be able to create a project or download a project without its CLI interfaces, but I must say, in current versions, create a project or start an Ionic "server" (command ionic serve) for example it is so laborious that barely makes up for the work, I researched enough about the three (angular, Ionic and Cordova) and saw no less difficult way to use any of them without their own Clis.

I believe that even if they were frameworks independent of their CLI and were easy to work with, still with CLI it would always be easier, since to create a project just one command.