I (not) heart *nix
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Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
I've often wondered why DOS (and later, UNIX) didn't prompt you for missing parameters.
Ever write batch files / scripts? Commands that prompt when you don't want them to suck. They're the equivalent of low-level Win32 library functions throwing up message boxes. On DOS, the commands that prompt for confirmation generally have switches to override the behavior (
/Y), while on *nix there's a command that confirms infinitely.Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
Good point. Thanks, Shog.
Cheers, Vıkram.
"if abusing me makes you a credible then i better give u the chance which didnt get in real" - Adnan Siddiqi.
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Chris Losinger wrote:
oh, how i'd love it if Windows had a command line half as smart as any of the unix shells.
Batch Files[^] are far more powerful than you think. ;)
Sunrise Wallpaper Project | The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader
that's awesome :) intuitive? no. but awesome nonetheless.
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Chris Losinger wrote:
oh, how i'd love it if Windows had a command line half as smart as any of the unix shells.
PowerShell doesn't work for you?
actually, no... because i can't install it. i get some error about invalid certificates and insufficient permissions (Vista).
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I respectfully disagree. :) Other than freshman-level engineering students, I don't know any Unix users who have to look up the syntax for the copy command. :) I find Unix being an entirely different mindset, and I find Unix to be much, much more powerful than any Windows I've ever used. I can do operations in Unix in 5 minutes that would take a whole day in Windows. A short digression: Recently for my research, I created a Unix command line tool. The source of the research's funding did not like that as they wanted a program with a graphical interface. Their reasoning being that their employees did not have the time to learn a command line program. (Now these are people who are performing IV&V on safety-critical software.) To which I replied, "You have people doing safety-critical IV&V who can't use a command line???" :omg:
There's a world of difference between being able to use a command line and a GUI. Most of the time, the user can navigate the GUI out of the box. With a command line app, the user has to know what options to pick and which arguments to specify. Also, the application itself can't do anything to help the process along with a command line application, since it isn't even running when the user is typing the command line in.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
Since 1997 I have been administering windows machines and since 2004 about the same # of linux machines. I very much prefer administering linix machines to windows machines. One reason is the command line part of windows sucks forcing you to use the slow user interface and watch the silly animations while you move files. And then most installations / upgrades require lots of user interaction. To upgrade my gentoo system I type
emerge -uD worldand let the machine do the rest. This will find, download and install updates for every single package I have in my system. Much easier than me doing all the work. The other big reason. Is no antivirus or antispyware software is needed on linux machines and so I do not have to deal with the headaches that these horrible programs cause. On the part of files and their locations. I agree with you on that. I believe most of this is due to the fact that their are way too many distributions and every distribution wants to do things their own way...John
John M. Drescher wrote:
One reason is the command line part of windows sucks forcing you to use the slow user interface and watch the silly animations while you move files.
Hmm... In a Windows (both client and server) CMD box this command will move files and folders without the silly UI animation: "move {source} {target}" and you can add the optional /Y to suppress overwriting prompts. Truth be told, 99% of your old DOS commands still work in Windows client and server editions without having to wait for silly slow user interface animations. You can even join domains and add domain users using the command line.
Mike Poz
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I've been given some more linux boxes to admin. Which means I've had to spend time today (well most of the day so far) randomly (re)learning the idiotic unix command line syntax needed to get things done. And I've had it up to *here* with the brain dead design and implementation of unix. Why is this system so popular? How is it possible for *multiple* generations of programmers to have their collective heads so deeply buried in the sand that virtually no real change or innovation has occurred in 30 years? Classic example, you need help, so what do you type? "man". That's right a 3 letter command (and you'd better be grateful it has a vowel, most don't), short for manual. Why not "manual", well that would be too much typing and apparently we're all still using 9 baud modems circa 1972. And to add insult to injury, it's a noun. Yes, you want to "perform" something, a verb, yet you're required to remember a noun. News break boys: it was idiotic in 1970, and *30* goddamn years later it's still stupid. Whatever. And why is it so hard to agree on a friggin file system layout and then everyone play nice? Isn't that what's supposed to be so great about open platforms? Apparently not, as genius wunderkinds at RedHat feel that they can add value by strewing random files for various common programs (like Apache) all over the place, leaving you, as the sys admin, to waste time spent randomly searching for config files. For example, if you build apache from source, the end result gets put into a standard set of directories. Binaries, configs, etc, all easy to find. If you install the apache module pre-built by red hat, thinking you'll save time, or be more "standard", or whatever goofy rationalization you're making, using their rpms, then no, we'll just randomly move shit around because we're *RedHat* and we know better. Dumbasses. And of course all the cute little techniques I've learned (again) today, will soon become forgotten because their so completely useless to what I do on a day to day basis, which is programming, most of the time. It's like you're trying to get useful work done with a bizarre 5 dimensional Rube Goldberg contraption that never really worked well to begin with, and now has so many patches, upon hacks, upon clever kludges, upon duct taped clusterfucks, that a nearby dog with a bad case of flatulence can blow the whole thing down. I hate *nix. Working with *nix makes me want to beat people with a club.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real
Jim Crafton wrote:
Classic example, you need help, so what do you type? "man". That's right a 3 letter command (and you'd better be grateful it has a vowel, most don't), short for manual. Why not "manual", well that would be too much typing and apparently we're all still using 9 baud modems circa 1972. And to add insult to injury, it's a noun. Yes, you want to "perform" something, a verb, yet you're required to remember a noun. News break boys: it was idiotic in 1970, and *30* goddamn years later it's still stupid. Whatever.
Well, to be fair, imagine the real world impact of renaming man pages to something different would be. Does everyone adopt it? All legacy distros? Retrain millions of users to accept the new buzzword? I prefer standardization even if it doesn't quite make sense initially. For instance, I which both Linux and Windows share the same standard for undo/redo. Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-Y on Windows, and Ctrl-Z-Ctrl-Shift-Z on Linux. But to change this now in either OS would be painful for the entire group of users for that system. So I use both. I hear your gripes, but I'm not sure I'm that sympathetic*. *regarding the naming conventions and the desire to make them more modern that is....
I've heard more said about less.
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senylity wrote:
It makes it better, right
If they would genuinely fix things, innovate, and change, then yes. Sadly this doesn't really happen. Witness the continued popularity of make, automake, autoconf, init, etc.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
Jim Crafton wrote:
Witness the continued popularity of make
...verses the current popularity of NAnt. ;)
I've heard more said about less.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Witness the continued popularity of make
...verses the current popularity of NAnt. ;)
I've heard more said about less.
compared to make NAnt is a work of art. Make files are, for anything useful, typically inscrutable, and fragile as hell, forget to use a tab in the right place and the whole thing is broken. It's simply a dumb design. It was not very good in the late 70s (or whenever it came into being) and it's not very good now.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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Jim Crafton wrote:
it's 2008, let's see some real innovation here!
MS still crowbar a lot of filenames to 8.3 format so *nix is not alone.
Well I haven't really brought up MS. I could dive in there as well. However, the linux folks are the ones constantly yammering about the supposed superiority of their OS. All I'm saying is put your money where your mouth is, or shut the hell up (not to you :) ).
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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There's a world of difference between being able to use a command line and a GUI. Most of the time, the user can navigate the GUI out of the box. With a command line app, the user has to know what options to pick and which arguments to specify. Also, the application itself can't do anything to help the process along with a command line application, since it isn't even running when the user is typing the command line in.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Also, the application itself can't do anything to help the process along with a command line application, since it isn't even running when the user is typing the command line in.
Unless it's VMS :) In VMS you can simply type the command, and then the OS, in combination with template that the program has, will prompt you for options. And it's relatively easy to use and understand what it wants (in my experience). And if you give it bogus data, the errors, while not incredibly user friendly, are *light years* what you get on *nix or windows, which usually either fail silently, dump core, or spit out some cryptic error code/message that is frequently only tangentially related to what actually went wrong.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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:laugh:
"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"
" :laugh: " That's what I'd thought you'd say... ;)
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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calm down and breathe... working with *some* nix's is a pain ... red hat sucks as far as im concerned precisely because of what you say about random places for files ... most other distros use standard stuff as for "man" ... yeah ... i never use it ... "google" is better ;)
"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"
l a u r e n wrote:
red hat sucks as far as im concerned precisely because of what you say about random places for files
Not unsurprisingly.... RH is the choice of "military intelligence".... :rolleyes:
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l a u r e n wrote:
as for "man" ... yeah ... i never use it
See, that's your problem right there. Men are useful...
"impossible" is just an opinion.
Anton Afanasyev wrote:
Men are useful...
every woman should own one.... :omg: (bumper sticker I saw today)
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I've been given some more linux boxes to admin. Which means I've had to spend time today (well most of the day so far) randomly (re)learning the idiotic unix command line syntax needed to get things done. And I've had it up to *here* with the brain dead design and implementation of unix. Why is this system so popular? How is it possible for *multiple* generations of programmers to have their collective heads so deeply buried in the sand that virtually no real change or innovation has occurred in 30 years? Classic example, you need help, so what do you type? "man". That's right a 3 letter command (and you'd better be grateful it has a vowel, most don't), short for manual. Why not "manual", well that would be too much typing and apparently we're all still using 9 baud modems circa 1972. And to add insult to injury, it's a noun. Yes, you want to "perform" something, a verb, yet you're required to remember a noun. News break boys: it was idiotic in 1970, and *30* goddamn years later it's still stupid. Whatever. And why is it so hard to agree on a friggin file system layout and then everyone play nice? Isn't that what's supposed to be so great about open platforms? Apparently not, as genius wunderkinds at RedHat feel that they can add value by strewing random files for various common programs (like Apache) all over the place, leaving you, as the sys admin, to waste time spent randomly searching for config files. For example, if you build apache from source, the end result gets put into a standard set of directories. Binaries, configs, etc, all easy to find. If you install the apache module pre-built by red hat, thinking you'll save time, or be more "standard", or whatever goofy rationalization you're making, using their rpms, then no, we'll just randomly move shit around because we're *RedHat* and we know better. Dumbasses. And of course all the cute little techniques I've learned (again) today, will soon become forgotten because their so completely useless to what I do on a day to day basis, which is programming, most of the time. It's like you're trying to get useful work done with a bizarre 5 dimensional Rube Goldberg contraption that never really worked well to begin with, and now has so many patches, upon hacks, upon clever kludges, upon duct taped clusterfucks, that a nearby dog with a bad case of flatulence can blow the whole thing down. I hate *nix. Working with *nix makes me want to beat people with a club.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real
Jim Crafton wrote:
Apparently not, as genius wunderkinds at RedHat feel that they can add value by strewing random files for various common programs (like Apache) all over the place
RH has the military contract and the only "approved" army (not sure of other forces) Linux operating system. In some areas it is the ONLY approved army OS. It has often been said that predators begin to resemble their prey in some ways, a cat gets a slightly rodent look on it... and RH begins to resemble military intelligence.... makes more sense now? :doh:
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I've been given some more linux boxes to admin. Which means I've had to spend time today (well most of the day so far) randomly (re)learning the idiotic unix command line syntax needed to get things done. And I've had it up to *here* with the brain dead design and implementation of unix. Why is this system so popular? How is it possible for *multiple* generations of programmers to have their collective heads so deeply buried in the sand that virtually no real change or innovation has occurred in 30 years? Classic example, you need help, so what do you type? "man". That's right a 3 letter command (and you'd better be grateful it has a vowel, most don't), short for manual. Why not "manual", well that would be too much typing and apparently we're all still using 9 baud modems circa 1972. And to add insult to injury, it's a noun. Yes, you want to "perform" something, a verb, yet you're required to remember a noun. News break boys: it was idiotic in 1970, and *30* goddamn years later it's still stupid. Whatever. And why is it so hard to agree on a friggin file system layout and then everyone play nice? Isn't that what's supposed to be so great about open platforms? Apparently not, as genius wunderkinds at RedHat feel that they can add value by strewing random files for various common programs (like Apache) all over the place, leaving you, as the sys admin, to waste time spent randomly searching for config files. For example, if you build apache from source, the end result gets put into a standard set of directories. Binaries, configs, etc, all easy to find. If you install the apache module pre-built by red hat, thinking you'll save time, or be more "standard", or whatever goofy rationalization you're making, using their rpms, then no, we'll just randomly move shit around because we're *RedHat* and we know better. Dumbasses. And of course all the cute little techniques I've learned (again) today, will soon become forgotten because their so completely useless to what I do on a day to day basis, which is programming, most of the time. It's like you're trying to get useful work done with a bizarre 5 dimensional Rube Goldberg contraption that never really worked well to begin with, and now has so many patches, upon hacks, upon clever kludges, upon duct taped clusterfucks, that a nearby dog with a bad case of flatulence can blow the whole thing down. I hate *nix. Working with *nix makes me want to beat people with a club.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real
Jim Crafton wrote:
And of course all the cute little techniques I've learned (again) today, will soon become forgotten because their so completely useless to what I do on a day to day basis, which is programming, most of the time.
I think we all understand the need to vent, but let us hope you're documenting these techniques so the next person doesn't have to experience the same frustration...who knows, it may be you! ;-)
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I respectfully disagree. :) Other than freshman-level engineering students, I don't know any Unix users who have to look up the syntax for the copy command. :) I find Unix being an entirely different mindset, and I find Unix to be much, much more powerful than any Windows I've ever used. I can do operations in Unix in 5 minutes that would take a whole day in Windows. A short digression: Recently for my research, I created a Unix command line tool. The source of the research's funding did not like that as they wanted a program with a graphical interface. Their reasoning being that their employees did not have the time to learn a command line program. (Now these are people who are performing IV&V on safety-critical software.) To which I replied, "You have people doing safety-critical IV&V who can't use a command line???" :omg:
Why do it in command line if you can do it in GUI? Hmm, I surely want to do things in command line to look more hackerish. =))
It is said that the most complex structures built by mankind are software systems. This is not generally appreciated because most people cannot see them. Maybe that's a good thing because if we saw them as buildings, we'd deem many of them unsafe.
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Programmers do not good admins make. Be thankful you are not administering Windows.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingwayoooooh. Sigbait! Can I, pretty please? ;P
It is said that the most complex structures built by mankind are software systems. This is not generally appreciated because most people cannot see them. Maybe that's a good thing because if we saw them as buildings, we'd deem many of them unsafe.
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Since 1997 I have been administering windows machines and since 2004 about the same # of linux machines. I very much prefer administering linix machines to windows machines. One reason is the command line part of windows sucks forcing you to use the slow user interface and watch the silly animations while you move files. And then most installations / upgrades require lots of user interaction. To upgrade my gentoo system I type
emerge -uD worldand let the machine do the rest. This will find, download and install updates for every single package I have in my system. Much easier than me doing all the work. The other big reason. Is no antivirus or antispyware software is needed on linux machines and so I do not have to deal with the headaches that these horrible programs cause. On the part of files and their locations. I agree with you on that. I believe most of this is due to the fact that their are way too many distributions and every distribution wants to do things their own way...John
I think that the main problem with *nix is that most distro do not focus on the needs or applications of their userbase. This goes for Windows as well, but we're talking Unix/Linux here, and Red Hat is the most notorious and infamous offender here. It would great if Ubuntu and a few other popular distros devs would get their collective acts together and not just develop for themselves. I'd love improvements to the command line, etc. Man is useful, but a pain if you're in the middle of editing scripts in VIM or doing something intensive that you really don't want to waste time 'man-ing'. It's that aspect of every distro wanting to do things their own way. It's nice, but in the end, if they want to cover more ground find more use by developers and end-users alike... they should listen to us and accept our open source suggestions.
Gotta love linux
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Also, the application itself can't do anything to help the process along with a command line application, since it isn't even running when the user is typing the command line in.
Unless it's VMS :) In VMS you can simply type the command, and then the OS, in combination with template that the program has, will prompt you for options. And it's relatively easy to use and understand what it wants (in my experience). And if you give it bogus data, the errors, while not incredibly user friendly, are *light years* what you get on *nix or windows, which usually either fail silently, dump core, or spit out some cryptic error code/message that is frequently only tangentially related to what actually went wrong.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Classic example, you need help, so what do you type? "man". That's right a 3 letter command (and you'd better be grateful it has a vowel, most don't), short for manual. Why not "manual", well that would be too much typing and apparently we're all still using 9 baud modems circa 1972. And to add insult to injury, it's a noun. Yes, you want to "perform" something, a verb, yet you're required to remember a noun. News break boys: it was idiotic in 1970, and *30* goddamn years later it's still stupid. Whatever.
Well, to be fair, imagine the real world impact of renaming man pages to something different would be. Does everyone adopt it? All legacy distros? Retrain millions of users to accept the new buzzword? I prefer standardization even if it doesn't quite make sense initially. For instance, I which both Linux and Windows share the same standard for undo/redo. Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-Y on Windows, and Ctrl-Z-Ctrl-Shift-Z on Linux. But to change this now in either OS would be painful for the entire group of users for that system. So I use both. I hear your gripes, but I'm not sure I'm that sympathetic*. *regarding the naming conventions and the desire to make them more modern that is....
I've heard more said about less.
Could you not just write a bit of code to intercept the "manual" command and send it on to "man" if you really really wanted to? I would just like to add that at least you can paste stuff into the command prompt with out right clicking and selecting paste. Stupid Windows...:mad: