Thanks for all the helpful advice. My next stint on windoze might not be as painful as my last. I should not have to boot out to get tools but it's much easier for me to use GNU tools on a dual booted box. Knoppix also works to find, archive and otherwise manipulate windows files. Even BCC linux can help. Still, I can imagine a situation where I just can't do that and now I can do something about it.
I've used windows 2000 pro for the last four months and the console was painful without TweakUI and other applications. Command /? is not comparable to man pages so a browser is still needed for reasonable advice. I'm not used to having to use a GUI tool for something as basic as paths and I'm spoiled by the way that Linux distros just get it right in the first place, right down to your own /home/user/bin that gets searched. The 2000 pro box I was on came with no zip and no find on the command line. I doubt that they will ever be as powerful as the GNU tar and find utilities. It did not have up/down arrow command memory. Will putting double quotes around a file name work for all applications, or will some choke because they are still expecting micros~1.123 file names? Will tab complete remember my double quotes for me? Other utilities I take for granted, like imagemagick, were not there either. All of those things are not command.com's fault but out of the box it sucks hard and is nothing like bash. What's a body to do? http://wigner.cped.ornl.gov/the-gang/1999-01/1396.html On Friday 02 April 2004 08:07, LeJeune, Randy wrote: > >What can you DO with a DOS prompt? I'm so spoiled by GNU tools that > > the average windoze box is just impossible for me. > > Most of what you can do with bash. > > >There's no man pages, > > $ command /? > > > paths are all broken, > > Right click "My computer", click "System --> Advanced --> Environment > variables", then set the path. CLick OK. > > >there's no find or archive utilities, > > C:\> zip /? > C:\> find /? > > > you are lucky if you have command memory > > Use the up/down arrows > > >but forget tab complete > > Install TweakUI and set the tab as the commandcompletion key > > >filenames with spaces in them > > Put double quotes around filenames with spaces > >
