Darren New wrote:
> Sure. UNIX definitely comes with a lot of text manipulation tools that 
> Windows doesn't. On the other hand, lots of Windows files aren't text, 
> and Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.

Just as an example, there's no UNIX text-processing tool that will look in 
an ODF word processing file to find some text but only in the comments 
submitted by a particular author of the ODF file, or only in boldface, or 
only the author's names; nor is there a text processing tool in UNIX to find 
every number in the third column of a particular spreadsheet whose value is 
more than 50, or the word "POV-Ray" but only in emails from Darren sent 
during February.

... just to clarify what I mean. Windows gives you ways of scripting this 
information in standard scripting languages. You can write a script that 
picks mail messages out of your email client by date and sender, runs them 
through VIM to reverse each line of text, and then populate an Excel 
spreadsheet with any line of text that has more than five characters, all in 
the scripting languages that come with Windows.

Grep works great on easy-to-parse text files. Most Windows programs don't 
use easy-to-parse text files. Hence, people tend not to miss that 
functionality unless they're programmers.

The whole "Microsoft won't tell us their file formats" complaint is missing 
the point. That's not how you do things in Windows.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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