From yet another (sensible) Anonymous on LHB:
I used to do vmware windows in linux for years, but when I moved to more engineering roles, I’m stuck in Excel/Visio/Exchange/Powerpoint all day. So I kept cygwin around for my unix needs (perl/ssh/bash)
See, even when these people Move To The Dark Side, they can’t quite get it right.
I have cygwin installed at work. (Microsoft.) Everybody I work with has cygwin installed. (Or at least MingGW.) It has many advantages in the narrow little world of development: find, grep, er well there’s also find and grep and occasionally some nutter comes along and insists on cut and sort … many advantages, indeed.
Perl is not one of them. There are a surprisingly large number of ways of installing Perl, natively, on Windows. I know he doesn’t mention it, but Python is even more not one of them: you can even be esoteric and install pythonxy for numpy and scipy and matplotlib. (Being Linux-based in origin, these things break all the standard ways of distributing Python modules, but that’s fine and you can still do it.)
I suppose ssh comes in handy every now and again.
But bash (TuringComplete™)? Oh God please no. Not on a Windows machine.
Not even on a Linux machine.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there is no such multi-headed beast as “Unix needs.” It’s simply a mantra that has been drilled in to credulous people at sophomore level or before. There are only “Computer needs.”
You don’t write C in Java. You don’t write PHP in Lisp. You work with what you’ve got —
— and if the Computer Gods are not feeling really pissed off at you, what you’ve got is Windows. It’s not great, but you aren’t going to make it any better by pretending that it’s a half-assed clone of a half-assed rip-off of a half-assed 1970s CLI.
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Then again, I could just be pissed off because I run my logit model categorization for a month’s worth of news feeds through Python on Cygwin using a mix of C++ and Python and Perl programs, and it breaks because Perl is so sodding awful at dealing with the simple concept of EOL.
And even that wouldn’t be a problem, but for the fact that Cygwin, post 1.7, no longer give you the option of choosing “DOS files” (c/r, l/f) or “Unix files” (l/f). Just typical, that. Thanks so much.
I too have Unix needs. I need to watch Unix buried at a crossroads with a flaming garlic-encrusted stake through its shrivelled little heart.
Comments
This is barely coherent.
Those technologies are all available on windows already:
Perl = Perl (get the windows installer)
SSH = Putty
Bash = PowerShell (unless you absolutely need some specific bash implementation to run a particular script. In that case, get win-bash or one of the 10 others like it)
Let me spell it out for you, young Thomas. You do not “think” Unix when you “work” with Windows, any more than you “think” Windows when you “work” with Unix. To act in such a way is to invite, at best inefficiency, and at worst disaster.
TMR has simply repeated what I said, so clearly I am not coherent enough, but the basic point is surely rather obvious.
“This is barely coherent.”
Is this your insight on the subject matter?
How astounding!
I agree with you for most part. Windows does have most of the tools that are available for Linux that is not Cygwin.
But I think you fail to understand the utility of being able to compile and run Linux scripts and programs on Windows. Just because you don’t use them in Microsoft, doesn’t mean no one else does.
“But I think you fail to understand the utility of being able to compile and run Linux scripts and programs on Windows.”
TuringComplete™!
@BassBoy:
I think you’ve hit the central part of my argument right there. As it happens, I have spent the best part of a year diddling with bash scripts on a Windows box (it was a large-scale port from Solaris, and ok it was ksh translated into bash, but still).
It was horrible. It was a mistake. DO NOT PRETEND THAT WINDOWS IS UNIX, OR VICE VERSA. If the script is trivial enough, then you probably shouldn’t have written it in bash in the first place. If it is complex enough, it just ain’t gonna work.
Seriously. If you want a warm, comfortable, fuzzy feeling, just use Perl. It’s a small compromise to make, and the ActiveState download works just fine.
As an aside, I wish *nix advocates would stop using the throat-clearer “I think you fail to understand that …” Quite a lot of us out here have used *nix, often for decades. I don’t pretend to be omniscient on the platform, but I certainly know enough for the purposes of most CLI arguments.
“As an aside, I wish *nix advocates would stop using the throat-clearer “I think you fail to understand that …”“
Linus agrees with you1:
“I hate it how the FSF thinks others are morons and
cannot read or think for themselves.
Any time you disagree with the FSF, you “misunderstand” (insert
condescending voice) the issue.”
[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/8382
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