Are there any ms-dos replacements out there for Windows. One that I can do shell programming with. I would just use Linux but Mom needs Windows for business related work. Any ideas? Or do you think it would be easiest just to write my own new shell :D

check this link out.

Here


never used it my self but looks interesting.

http://www.cygwin.com, nothing like a Bash or CSH shell for windows eh?

would be nice if it just came installed with linux.

Their are several options for programming windows shells. Their is no reason other than preference to chooce a non-native command interpreter(like GNU Bash and the like). I have to admit that I use UNIX shells under windows, but if you really want to learn the Windows side of things with an alternatve command shell, look around for 4DOS. It is a huge extension over the traditional DOS/Win32 emulator with added control flow and looping supersets(though DOS/Win32 doesn't really need it, since cmd has a powerful "enough" set of tools with tons of documentation(see F1).

I really favor running things natively and in a non-emulated level, so for me, things like Cygwin are out of the question. If you want the GNU set of shells, utilties, and programming tools(perl, awk, etc...), you might want to try out Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX(SFU 3.5). It is great if you have to administer both unix and windows workstations and fell more comfortable in a win32 environment while still wanting to run all of those shell scripts everyone rants on about.

It comes with ksh, csh, tcsh, and sh off the bat which should be enough(though the csh family of shells has some really nasty bugs when it comes to shell programming), you might want to use Bash(but I think ksh is sufficient). The people at InterOp have ported alot of other GNU utilities to the Interix/SFU subsystem(like Bash and updated versions of alot of what is included) as well as an X server(Desktop-X), but that is aquired after purchasing of a license.

One last word: stick with cmd... :).

I'm in the same boat: many years programming in Unix, now I have to do work on the PC and I cannot stand the DOS shell.

I've spent a LOT of time looking for solutions, and have not found a good one yet. Here are some of the things I tried, and their drawbacks:

- SFU - Huge. DOES NOT work on XP-home (must have XP-Pro).
- Cygwin - Huge. Slow, A big, complex layer between me and the
machine. Too much for what I want. Lots to go wrong.
- bash (actually, win-bash) : Looks like a great option, but I cannot
get the cd command to work when folders have spaces in the name.
- MKS Toolkit. A commercially sold shell that is very mature and
strong. Does most Unix functions. But it costs $500.
- Perl. OUTSTANDING scripting language, but it does not come with
an interactive shell (things like pwd, cd, ls, grep from a cmd line).

That's where I am now. Let me know if you find any great solution.

neal

If you check out the Perl manual pages, I seem to recall that somewhere in the introductory material is a very short (<20line) script that facilitates interactive use of the Perl interpreter. Not sure how good it is.

In response to thechristelegacy's original question; why not set up a dual boot arrangement? Partition off a good chunk of your machine's hard disk for Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever's your poison) and you can have both. I've got a setup like that on our main machine - 75Gb or so for Linux, 5Gb for Windows. You can merrily run a full installation of Linux on less than 10Gb, though.

One catch is, if it's WinXP you've got, good old FIPS can't resize NTFS partitions, so you'll need a better partition manager (like Partition Magic) to resize the existing partition if you want to do it nondestructively (i.e. avoid having to set up XP again from scratch).

My Mum's computer illiterate, though, and within a couple of weeks of switching her to SuSE Linux she was happier than she was after years of using Windows. She could still access all her Office documents using StarOffice (now OpenOffice) and she felt more comfortable about using email with KMail than with Outlook, and the 'web with Netscape rather than IE. Maybe your Mum just needs to try something new? :)