Many of the worst ones I've used have been embedded in physical devices - ethernet or fibre channel switches, disk arrays or controllers, etc. I've been around

Many of the worst ones I've used have been embedded in physical devices - ethernet or fibre channel switches, disk arrays or controllers, etc. I've been around long enough that I don't expect every CLI in the universe to have things like history, command line editing, or autocomplete, so that's OK. On the other hand, many of these interfaces are wildly inconsistent and that bugs me. Some commands are object-verb and some are verb-object. Some are abbreviated, some are verbose. One command produces an identifier in format X, but the next command consumes it in format Y so you can't even use your terminal's copy/paste function. Excessive modality is another common problem in these interfaces. Which sub-sub-sub-mode was the command I needed in, again? Can't know without actually entering that mode, and then the next related thing you have to do is in a completely different part of the tree. Using such interfaces directly can be painful, and automating them is often inordinately difficult too.