Completely unrelated to your post, but I didn't want to create a whole
new thread just for this, so I shamelessly am putting this here... :)

  Yesterday at work we had a a concrete situation where Unix (in this
specific case MacOS X, or more precisely its "unixy" features) was just
way handier than Windows.

  A co-worker had filtered some data in a file through a program to a
second file, but was suspicious that the program might actually have some
bug in it. He was wondering how he could most easily see what the program
had removed from the input.

  Being used to unix, my very first instinct was to say "diff the files".

  "How do I do that?" Right, he was in Windows, and there's no diff in
Windows. We pondered for a moment what would be the easiest solution.
He was using notepad++ as his text editor and we wondered if there would
be some way of comparing two files in it. With the million of menus in the
program, it was probably not worth the trouble.

  I was on the Mac at the moment and said "just send the files to me and
I'll diff them here". He sent them and it took me something like 2 seconds
to write a "diff file1 file2 | less", and there the info we wanted was.

  Sometimes things just *are* way easier in unix. Sure, there are tools
for Windows to do the same thing, but the problem is that Windows never
has *any* tools by default, and it would always require quite a lot of
work to get the tools. In unix the tools just are there, period. No need
to think nor hassle around.

  (Ok, unix doesn't have all possible tools for all possible tasks by
default, but in some cases, like this one, it just works like a charm.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message