That relies on there being a sufficiently versatile gui which isn’t guaranteed. Here’s some features that your example requires which I often don’t see in guis:

That relies on there being a sufficiently versatile gui which isn’t guaranteed. Here’s some features that your example requires which I often don’t see in guis: 1. Tables you can sort 2. Tables you can sort on the thing you actually care about 3. Being able to select multiple entries and act on your selection It’s not too hard to imagine criteria which could make the problem much harder for a gui, e.g. only doing the operation in a subdirectory (if the sorting is stable this isn’t so bad), or only on files not in a subdirectory (stable sorting won’t help here, you’d need the gui to let you eg search for / and then remove those things from your current selection), or only operating on .h files (you’d need a search->select feature again), or doing an operation that the gui doesn’t support on multiple files, or passing the list to some other tool (maybe you want to search makefiles for references to the deleted files). Something that a gui may be able to handle but that often screws up shells would be file names with newlines or spaces in them.