Comments on: Classic Shell Scripting

By: Ray Ingles

Ray Ingles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:23:57 +0000

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” – Jamie Zawinski

That’s humorously overstated, of course, but regular expressions can get awfully hairy for more complex cases.

By: GrayGaffer

GrayGaffer — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:00:17 +0000

*nix runs the various components of a compound command (i..e. with pipes or “ or 😉 as concurrent processes. Windows used to run them sequentially, not starting one until its predecessor had finished producing output and terminated. Is this still the case, or does XP/Vista run them concurrently now? The difference can be quite significant in terms of resources used and time to first output.

I also recall Windows had a very restricted concept of redirection – e.g. no equivalent to 2>& – and an equally restricted concept of Regular Expressions. Yes, it could ‘pattern match’, but give it multiple * (e.g. ab*de*ff) and it would fall apart. Is this all fixed too? I mistrust it so much in the area of shell scripting that when I am forced to use Windows I script in bash under cygwin. Or write Perl or Tcl scripts.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:16:34 +0000

Look in virtually any Microsoft Office file, for instance, and you will see gobbledygook.

For the record, that’s no longer the case with Office 2007.

Also, I only discovered last week that Windows’s FINDSTR supports regular expressions as well, and has for a long time.

Yes, the Windows command-line doesn’t hold a candle to bash (well, at least not without installing PowerShell, at which point it’s arguably more powerful), but it’s not THAT bad 🙂

By: Django Fett

Django Fett — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:06:46 +0000

NIce post. I’ve been a Linux user for about a year now and I love it. I’m currently running Arch on my desktop, Debian on my laptop, and have a server running Gentoo. Keep up the good work, I always enjoy your Linux posts.