Index of /log/Work/commandline-power

I think that the difference is in the cultures of Windows and Linux communities.  Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com wrote an essay on it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

Posted by Andrew at Fri Sep 23 00:18:50 2005 from

Could also have something to do with the fact that the Windows command shell is vastly underpowered.  For example, though you were able to do a wildcard match for the copy command, there is no equivalent of "globbing" on the Windows shell.  COPY implements its own wildcard matching, as do any other command-line utilities.

I found this out the hard way when I wrote a python application and ran it on Windows only to find wildcards not functioning.

In fact, there isn't much of a shell at all.  Batch scripts are hardly capable alongside bash or other UNIX shell scripts.  I hear Vista may get a real shell.

Most serious Windows users I know end up installing Cygwin on their machine for access to a real command line environment.  I suggest you recommend that to your friends/colleagues.  CYGWIN, believe it or not, can fully access NTFS via it's "cygdrive" feature, just type "cd C:" or "cd D:".  Saved me a couple times.

Posted by Andrew J. Montalenti at Fri Sep 23 03:54:59 2005 from

because it looks frumpy, normal users think that it is a relic from the 80's

Posted by Martin Fischer at Fri Sep 23 12:05:42 2005 from

We are creatures of habit. Most people start on a Windows machine. They don't like to change. I taught CS for 20 years. My students complained about using the Mac GUI as much as using the Linux command line.

A good tutorial for learning the CLI is at linuxcommand.org

Posted by Bob Plantz at Fri Sep 23 18:31:37 2005 from

That Command Line looks like DOS to many of the windows users... while some of them don't have a clue about either, those who have a clue consider DOS un1337.

Posted by tiax at Sat Sep 24 01:19:06 2005 from

Windows XP vastly improved the power of the Windows command line. Most windows people are still stuck in the Windows 9x/DOS command line, let alone the underpowered Windows 2000 command line.

The other problem is the deep inconsistency. Try "help for" and read through the myriad of capabilities of the FOR statement. Then wonder just why so many features had to be crammed into something which should be as simple as a FOR.

Posted by RichB at Sun Sep 25 21:52:20 2005 from

It's interesting that you should choose this example. Because renaming multiple files is quite hard to do under unix. You can do it with a weird mix of sed and xargs (hoping that embedded spaces or metacharacters doesn't make it blow up in your face), or use a third party tool (such as mmv or rename). But it's nowhere as easy as under a DOS shell.

That being said, I must agree with the other posters. The command-line under windows is rather useless. It's not like you can do much useful with it, besides renaming files.

Posted by Interesting... at Mon Sep 26 09:06:39 2005 from

I am really frustrated using Windows XP command line, Its totally useless. It makes you handicapped with only few commands, you are left figuring out how to write a batch file that does whatever u want. So stop investing ur time to learn dos commands, instead try something else . . . .

Posted by batch at Mon Apr 2 12:15:19 2007 from