Re^8: What's wrong with @ARGV - or with me?
by johngg (Canon) on Jun 12, 2013 at 21:30 UTC
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If you mostly work in a *nix environment, but occasionally have to use a Windows machine
I'm always using a Windows machine because that's what my company insists I use to do my work. The standard build is pure MS Windows, suitable for all the management twonks who decide these things and who think Powerpoint and that well known database system Excel are all anyone needs :-/
just install a VM instance of my preferred *nix dist
If the laptop provided wasn't one of Noah's hand-me-downs that struggles to even boot I probably would, although my preference would be for a native Linux laptop with a Windows VM just for the corporate stuff like email and timesheets. Unfortunately, they won't let us do that so we have to add our own choice of tools, things like PuTTY and Cygwin, on top of the standard build to make our jobs easier.
By emulating (badly)
I don't know. Perhaps it does some things badly but it does the things I need very well. It gives me an X-Window Server so that I can run an xterm and use my favourite editor (nedit) to develop Perl scripts or display server GUI tools on my screen. SSH keys work seamlessly between Cygwin and Linux and I can use scp, sftp or rsync to deploy the scripts and move files between my laptop and servers. It gives me utilities like ccrypt, cpio and tar and plenty more. In short, it does what I need.
I much prefer cmd.exe to (z|k|z|ba)sh
I much prefer the more mouse-centric copy'n'paste of xterms and find that of cmd.exe extremely clunky when forced to use it on terminal servers that don't have Cygwin installed, which is all of them, a battle yet to be won :-)
Until they allow me to use a Linux laptop for my work I'll continue to use what is for me the next best thing, Cygwin.
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Re^8: What's wrong with @ARGV - or with me?
by Crackers2 (Parson) on Jun 12, 2013 at 15:28 UTC
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but because I much prefer cmd.exe to (z|k|z|ba)sh
I'd be interested in knowing your reasons for this. I do most of my work at a linux shell prompt, and I've never really found cmd.exe to be useful for anything other than starting console programs.
I'm not trying to start some windows vs linux flamewar here. I've only had to write a couple of batch files in the last few years, so maybe cmd.exe has more functionality now.
This is one of the uglies from my last script:
for /F "tokens=*" %%i in ('findvmip') do set vmip=%%i%
For with the bash equivalent would be a simple
vmip=`findvmip`
A quick google also still doesn't turn up any way to create functions in cmd. And command line editing functionality in cmd appears to lack a lot of the (to me) convenient bash stuff as well
So what's the thing that makes cmd preferable for you?
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In part, my preference for the simplicity of cmd.exe is related to my preference for the simplicity of my preferred editor: textpad.
I prefer my 'simple', non-programmable editor because it is non-programmable. It is because I do not get tempted to try and perform tasks that actually require a programming language, and then waste time either jumping through hoops trying to make an inadequate tool do what I need; or having to perform a wholesale conversion to a proper programming language, once I reach the limits of the editors built-in facility.
Ok that makes sense. For me personally there's still a vast amount of tasks that make more sense to do in the shell than in an actual program, but I can certainly understand the other opinion.
Finally, I infinitely prefer the line editing, command line history and cut&paste facilities of a windowed cmd.exe session to anything available on *nix.
This one does still puzzle me, because:
Every keyboard I've used in the past 20+ years has had arrow keys; home & end; delete & insert; pgup & pgdn; a set of programmable function keys. These keys perform the same tasks in just about every application I use
arrows,home/end,pgup/pgdown work the same in most linux terminals as in the windows commands prompt (though I do admit that some may not be set up right by default). The functions keys in the command prompt do not appear to do anything remotely similar to what they do in other apps. (F3 isn't search like it is in most apps, F4 does some delete thing which I've never seen anywhere else)
Cut and paste is probably just familiarity; I very much prefer being able to just select with the mouse and right-click to paste over have to explictly click "mark" first.
Command history seems a lot more powerful in bash; cmd seems limited to a simple up/down arrow? But that might be another simpler-is-better thing for you?
Overall that was a very enlightening answer. I'd been trying to think of functionality that was _missing_ from bash, while it turned out to be not about that at all.
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