Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Heck, even just finding
> > a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> > anything more advanced than that.

> Vista actually does this quite nicely.  Or in stall Agent Ransack.

  I suppose it supports extended regular expressions?

  (Of course searching files is just one of the many things one might need
to do in a semi-regular basis. Searching and replacing a regular expression
on a bunch of files with a certain name patter in a directory structure is
not even a far-fetched thing to do. Or the myriad of other things which are
handy to do on a unix command line.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Try ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn - that works for me in FF.

Jim

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> Heck, even just finding
>>> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
>>> anything more advanced than that.
> 
>> Vista actually does this quite nicely.  Or in stall Agent Ransack.
> 
>   I suppose it supports extended regular expressions?

You said "a certain string".  No, I don't think Vista does this natively. 
For that, try Agent Ransack, which is quite nice and free.  (I made the 
perhaps mistaken assumption you were complaining about something that was 
actually a problem for you. :-)

Or, you know, install the free tools.

>   (Of course searching files is just one of the many things one might need
> to do in a semi-regular basis. Searching and replacing a regular expression
> on a bunch of files with a certain name patter in a directory structure is
> not even a far-fetched thing to do. Or the myriad of other things which are
> handy to do on a unix command line.)

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.

-- 
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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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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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.

  It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 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.

  Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
XP just doesn't work).

  Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:

>   You are blaming Windows for something that the applications do (iow.
> consume lots of memory)?
> 
>   If anything, you could blame Windows developers for being lazier or less
> competent than Amiga developers, and I wouldn't have much to argue about
> that. However, I don't really buy this "Windows was *vastly* slower than
> Amiga, even though the hardware was considerably more advanced".

I don't think multiple seconds to close a window is "responsive". The 
Amiga always managed to do this instantly, on every occasion. Only 
recently have PCs been able to duplicate this seemingly trivial feat. 
Sounds like a huge inefficiency to me.

(Then again, the Amiga lacks the capability for virtual memory. It 
doesn't physically possess the hardware to implement it. I guess that 
makes software authors a little more careful...)

>> That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like 
>> configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard 
>> in Linux.
> 
>   Then you have either lied about trying OpenSUSE, or you have never even
> opened Yast. Or you are exaggerating on purpose, for whatever reason.

As part of the Disaster Recovery plan I keep going on about, I had to 
set up a PC with two NICs and configure it as a NAT router. Now, in 
fairness, as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*. But it 
was pretty hard to do from Linux either.

I don't recall exactly which distro I used - I think I probably used 
KNOPPIX (i.e., Debian). And I probably didn't find the "simplest" way of 
doing it. I just dug through endless manpages and help files until I 
found a combination that works. Basically the DNS configuration lives in 
one file, DHCP settings in another file, and IP address settings have to 
be frobbed using ifconfig. And then there's the route command, which 
(logically enough) frobs the kernel routing table. Or something like 
that... I don't have my notes any more.

>> Under 
>> Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what 
>> you want the settings to be.
> 
>   Exactly how this is relevantly different from Yast?

I didn't know Yast could do this. (As I say, I haven't needed to do it 
recently.)

>> ...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing?
> 
>   That sounds such a "window'ish" question.

I just can't imagine a situation where you'd ever need to, that's all.

>> And 
>> wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the 
>> entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?
> 
>   You know, not every search must be done on every single file in the system.
> You can actually limit searches to certain directories. Even in Windows.

Oh, right. You mean "find out which one of *these* files contains a 
given string"? That makes a bit more sense...

>   Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
> unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
> like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
> a thing"?

I throught that grep is an overly-complicated way of searching for the 
location of a string within one particular file? (I usually just use my 
text editor's "search" function.)

>   Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
> other people do.

I guess I don't very often edit large files...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Warp wrote:

>   Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
> competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
> XP just doesn't work).

I can't say I've ever needed to use this more than about thrice. And 
that was only to find temp files on the server so I could delete them to 
free up some space. I've never needed to search *inside* files...

>   Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.

Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" seems to be "figure out what 90% of 
the population wants to do, and then make *that* so easy that a drooling 
retard could do it". Anything outside the set of things that 90% of the 
population are likely to want to do is... not so easy. [That was an 
understatement, by the way.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
> 
>   It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
> that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).

This discussion is starting to remind me of when people learn Haskell...

Newbies go "Man, Haskell sucks! Why the hell is it to hard to create 
global variables that I can actually write to?"

And the Haskell experts go "Man, WHY THE HELL would you want to do such 
a thing? Global variables are EVIL!"

And after a few iterations of this, it turns out that the newbie is 
trying to perform a task which Haskell can do in a way that's 500x 
easier than the way they're trying to do it, because they're used to 
doing it the "normal" way...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Darren New wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.

...so how do you actually do this then?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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