I want to argue with Asher.

[Addled Platypus]

Originally posted by Asher
This thread sucks (now).

cause you ran out of logial input

[Maquiladora]

Which laptop did you go for Lorizael?

[Lorizael]

An Asus W7J. One of the only laptops I could find that was under 5 lbs and smaller than 15", and had a decent graphics card.

[Rasputin]

why do yo u want t o argue ?

[Lorizael]

Okay, what makes Linux's CLI so much more "powerful" than Windows' poopy GUI? I often hear that there are things you can do in Linux that Windows doesn't even try to do, but I really don't know what this is supposed to mean.

[Asher]

It's extremely powerful, a lot moreso than the default Windows one.

If you want a powerful shell on Windows, install Windows PowerShell: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...l/default.mspx

There's a ton of advanced features of such shells (such as scripting) that is pretty tedious to explain, and useless to most casual users.

[Lorizael]

I have a lot of (outdated) programming and computer knowledge, so I will probably have a vague understanding of what you mean if you give a few examples.

[Q Classic]

Linux's CLI, which has shells such as BASH, ASH, KSH, and the like, all have advanced scripting abilities, the ability to pipe results into other programs, launch multiple programs in parallel or split them off into different processes, and so on.

The default Windows one can do batch files, which is about the extent of the scripting it can do--and is only linear in that capability, so if one particular program in that batch file hangs, the rest won't get done.

As far as PowerShell goes, I hadn't heard of it. Is it a derivative of what Microsoft was doing with Monad?

[Asher]

Windows PowerShell = Monad.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lorizael
I have a lot of (outdated) programming and computer knowledge, so I will probably have a vague understanding of what you mean if you give a few examples.

Here's an obvious one.

Search and replace in text files...

find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo' | xargs sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g'

Lets start from the beginning and work to the end:

1. "find . –type f" will recursively print to stdout every file name in the directory structure, starting from the current directory.
2. "|" takes what’s is stdout and uses it for stdin in the next command
3. "xargs" takes what’s in stdin and executes one command per line in stdin, using the line as the last argument in the command
4. "grep –l 'foo'' will find 'foo' in the files that are passed to it by xargs.

I think we need an example at this point. Using what we have so far "find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo'"

In the directory we have
deal.cpp
deal.h
dealUtils.cpp
include
src

'foo' is found in deal.cpp and deal.h

The find command will print out:
src/deal.cpp
src/dealUtils.cpp
include/deal.cpp

"| xargs" will take these file names and use them in a call to grep. The calls will look like:

grep –l 'foo' src/deal.cpp
grep –l 'foo' src/dealUtils.cpp
grep –l 'foo' include/deal.cpp

The '-l'option for grep is to just list the file name and not the line that contains 'foo'.

The output from grep at this stage will be:
src/deal.cpp
include/deal.cpp

5. "sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g'" this command will do the actual replacing in the file. It operates on the file supplied by the preceding xargs.

Continuing with the example, sed will be called twice:
sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g' src/deal.cpp
sed –I –e 's/foo/bar/g' include/deal.cpp

The 's/foo/bar/g' argument that you pass into sed is what tells it to replace foo with bar. This is the same format as used in vi so you can look it up if you don't understand it.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Lorizael
Okay, what makes Linux's CLI so much more "powerful" than Windows' poopy GUI? I often hear that there are things you can do in Linux that Windows doesn't even try to do, but I really don't know what this is supposed to mean.

I used to use the data piping features extensively on Unix, combined with the powerful data manipulation tools like sed, grep and awk. I was doing data conversions, and being able to send the results of one operation into another operation without needing to store the file in the intermediate state was very useful in the days of limited storage, but less important now I expect.

Versions of the data manipulation tools are available under windows, perhaps even as part of the powershell, but I have used them as part of a unix shell emulator under windows. Regular expressions were another feature of Unix which used to piss over windows, but again, I expect emulators are now available for windows which include these.

I haven't used Unix/Linux for years now, but at the time I though it was far more powerful an environmenmt than windows for what I needed to do with it. Windows was a toy in comparison.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Asher

Here's an obvious one.

Search and replace in text files...

find . -type f | xargs grep -l 'foo' | xargs sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g'

This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to. Glad to hear that windows has caught up. Does it do regular expressions too?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to. Glad to hear that windows has caught up. Does it do regular expressions too?

Yup.

[Datajack Franit]

and I thought learning ancient Greek was complicated

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Datajack Franit
and I thought learning ancient Greek was complicated

*shrug* I got all that, and I've never seen this stuff before. Or at least, I got all that to the extent that I could duplicate it later and then, through lots of playing around, begin to really understand it for myself.