2. Pantry's advantages

Pantry's true command-line interface gives it many advantages. Because Pantry works from your shell prompt, you can easily combine it with other text-processing tools. You can also easily write scripts incorporating Pantry, in ways that even I cannot anticipate. This is the strength of the Unix "toolbox" way of using a computer.

In addition, nothing beats the speed of a command-line program for something you use frequently and are familiar with. If you are using a nutrient-analysis program to track your daily food intake, you will appreciate how quickly you can use Pantry for this purpose. Indeed, I developed Pantry due to my frustration with current tools because it was very tedious to use them to quickly tally a day's food intake.

Because Pantry runs from a text console, you can easily set it up on one computer that has an SSH server running. You may then access your nutrient data from any computer that has an SSH client. Though Web-based nutrition-tracking services also offer the ability to access your data from any Internet-connected computer, Pantry is more private than Web-based services.