10 Dec
2011
10 Dec
'11
3:22 p.m.
On 11/12/11 3:59 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Just think of them as a picture of what you want to match. That's all
declarative syntaxes are.
On 8 December 2011 21:03, Dave McGuire<mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
Actually, the reverse is more true. Unix just doesn't treat file
extensions specially, which works very well, and is in keeping with
other successful and simplifying ideas in Unix. The idea of globbing or
regular expressions to select files fits this perfectly, since a
filename is a string, not some weird composite object.
On 12/07/2011 08:14 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
What is so tough is the way that the shell expands them, not the
command. I am assured this is wonderfully useful for many people but
for me it's a complete PITA. For instance, I frequently need to do
things like:
REN *.log *.old
... which works fine on DOS, Windows and most other OSs but doesn't
work on Unix/Linux.
In general, because file extensions are a sort of grafted-on
afterthought on Unix, I find it handles them very poorly, whereas they
were and remain integral to DOS-based& Windows-based systems - i.e.
about 95% of the machines I support.
I don't really understand why any techie dislikes it, TBH. It is
/vastly/ easier than, say, learning to understand how Unix wildcards
work, let alone regular expressions or something - both things which
I've not yet mastered after more than 20y of effort.
UNIX shell wildcards? A question mark matches any single character, an
asterisk matches any number of any characters. What's so tough about that? Regexps aren't quite that simple, but I
have a hard time believing anyone
couldn't get the general idea after maybe ten minutes. If you want to learn
that stuff, contact me offlist and I'll be happy to help.
I've been bending my brain against it since 1988. I doubt it's going
to stick now!
TBH, after 23y of supporting PCs, I am heartily sick of it and want
out. I have learned more OSs, more apps, more command-line interfaces
and GUIs and network protocols and so on than I can even enumerate any
more, and all but 2 of them are now completely obsolete and will never
earn me a penny again.
Windows knowledge has to be updated every few years as MICROS~1 change
everything, and I don't really like Windows any more anyway, even if I
know it better than anything else.
Unix knowledge helps me out on Linux but I am a bit of a Unix-hater
really, at heart, and I have never managed to truly master shell or C
or Perl or regexps or any of the core Unix toolkit. Linux has fixed
and improved lots of things, but it's still the same ugly, hostile old
system underneath.
OSs I really /liked/ at some time or for some reason included Acorn
RISC OS, BeOS, classic MacOS, OS/2, Psion EPOC, NewtonOS and Novell
Netware 2 and 3. And VMS, I suppose, but I only ever scratched the
surface. And all of them had lovely aspects that I cherished but also
terrible *terrible* problems and weaknesses as well.
All are essentially dead and gone now.
Why did you never try OS X? Power of Unix with ease of a modern GUI.
If I am lucky and I can find my way into it, I think I could be a good
technical author - explaining complex stuff to non-experts is a
speciality of mine...
Which topics are you best at?
--Toby