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mackenga · Jul 12th, 2006, 5:15 PM

Whether this will be useful to you depends on the context, but if you want to add some Unix utilities (like ls, grep, and several other stalwarts) to a Win32 system, you can; do a google for "unix utilities win32" and you should find some useful results. Of course, if you're not in a position to install extra software on the Windows machines in question, this will not help you.

If you are forced to use DOS commands and rework your systems to parse their output, be warned that the name is not the only difference between the likes of DIR and ls; pipes have never really worked well in the DOS shell and there are all kinds of other weird issues. Remember to check out the command-line arguments to the DOS commands; the output from DIR /B is a lot more like ls, which could help you with adaptation of any existing code.

Personally I'd just stick with Unix-like systems. It seems you have very little experience of Win32 systems, and I strongly suspect you're not going to enjoy the culture shock. It's hard to move from a platform where things can be expected to work in a predictable fashion and behave as described in the documentation to a flaky toaster like Windows. My employer operates a Win32 only environment, so I've had to move from Unix development to Win32 (in VB of all languages) and it's quite a come down, stepping off the solid bedrock of C, PHP, Perl, BSD Sockets and the Bourne Shell into the shifting sands land of Win32 and .NET. Aside from the fact that my employer will not pay me to develop on Linux, I can honestly say I see no advantage in this gaudy proprietary closed-source antistandard dungpile of an operating environment.

Jul 12th, 2006, 5:15 PM	#6
mackenga Professional Programmer Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Glasgow, Scotland Posts: 317 Rep Power: 4	Whether this will be useful to you depends on the context, but if you want to add some Unix utilities (like ls, grep, and several other stalwarts) to a Win32 system, you can; do a google for "unix utilities win32" and you should find some useful results. Of course, if you're not in a position to install extra software on the Windows machines in question, this will not help you. If you are forced to use DOS commands and rework your systems to parse their output, be warned that the name is not the only difference between the likes of DIR and ls; pipes have never really worked well in the DOS shell and there are all kinds of other weird issues. Remember to check out the command-line arguments to the DOS commands; the output from DIR /B is a lot more like ls, which could help you with adaptation of any existing code. Personally I'd just stick with Unix-like systems. It seems you have very little experience of Win32 systems, and I strongly suspect you're not going to enjoy the culture shock. It's hard to move from a platform where things can be expected to work in a predictable fashion and behave as described in the documentation to a flaky toaster like Windows. My employer operates a Win32 only environment, so I've had to move from Unix development to Win32 (in VB of all languages) and it's quite a come down, stepping off the solid bedrock of C, PHP, Perl, BSD Sockets and the Bourne Shell into the shifting sands land of Win32 and .NET. Aside from the fact that my employer will not pay me to develop on Linux, I can honestly say I see no advantage in this gaudy proprietary closed-source antistandard dungpile of an operating environment. __________________ "I'm not a genius. Why do I have to suffer?"