I previously asked this question on Meta to query the overzealous closing of this SU question as a duplicate. The moderator who initially closed it, without justification or explanation of the previous faulty judgement retracted it after being shown not to have read either question, and then quickly re-closed it again as being off-topic. It seems to me that this moderator isn't so much concerned with actually reading the questions they come across but indiscriminately chucking close reasons at questions and seeing which will stick. My last question was also closed by the same moderator for the same reason just a week ago.
I've been on SU for 5 years now, spent my time trying to carefully ask meaningful questions, and never have I come across the case of command-line tools being off-topic - quite the opposite, as a significant portion of the questions and answers that I've learnt from involve "recommending" a CLI tool that is the industry standard.
For example, is the equivalent question for SATA SSDs off-topic? Is this 100+ question off-topic? Is this question of my own off-topic? There's absolutely nothing in the closed question that makes it a "tool recommendation" question any more than these above questions. The tools being talked about here - dd, shred, Secure Erase, hdparm, ffmpeg, imagemagick, and so on - are often not only industry standards, but the only possible (non-proprietary) solution to these questions, and asking whether they exist for a specific function or not has never before been considered a shopping question.
If my question remains closed while the identical, highly-voted questions linked above are not going to be closed anytime soon, then the only thing left to wonder is why the "rules" are being applied inconsistently for higher value, higher traffic questions.
