From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2005-09-05T10:01:58+09:00
Subject: Re: windows shell

From: "Austin Ziegler" <halostatue@gmail.com>
> Frankly, cmd.exe is a lot better than most people think that it is.

It can't even escape its own metacharacters.

Its scripting/command language isn't remotely Turing-complete.

Its commands don't output information in ways that facilitate
being piped together.

... 'Could go on, but it's all downhill from here... variations
on themes, ideas, and metaphors that no-one at Microsoft has
apparently ever understood, despite their being established a
decade or so before Microsoft even came on the scene.

> Cygwin is a wholly unacceptable answer for a variety of reasons, but
> mostly because it tries to impose a totally different way of thinking
> on a system that doesn't map well that way.

Well; Cygwin tries to provide an environment in which unmodified
Unix programs can compile and run.  I use the hell out of the
cygwin unix progs (find, grep, diff, xargs, cp, mv, scp, rsync,
etc.) ... but I agree /bin/bash ends up being kind of a misfit
in Windows.

I use cmd.exe myself... but I absolutely loathe it, and everything
it stands for.                      :)


Regards,

Bill