why Unix?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:11:44 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> It took me a couple of minutes to write under her eyes a script that  
>> downloaded HTML, scraped the code for links, followed those of  
>> interest, and output a concatenation of all pages she was interested  
>> in, with details highlighted, that was loadable back in the browser.  
>> I'd show her one iteration, get feedback, and get the next iteration  
>> within seconds. All without "coding" in any sense as regularly  
>> understood by Windows programmers.
>
> I have no idea how to do that under unix. I obviously have not learned  
> anywhere near enough about it.

Probably start with wget, but I wouldn't know even close to enough about  
information in that HTML to be able to do something like this :)

But shell scripting in itself is so powerful for this kind of stuff.  I've  
written lots of little scripts to do fantastic things that on Windows  
would be so painful (without cygwin of course).  Like renaming all files  
of a certain type to something else, or copying select files to another  
directory.

For example, here's a script I wrote to change which D compiler I want to  
use:

#!/bin/bash

dir=$1
if [ "$2" = "" ]
then
     mode=dmd
else
     mode=$2
fi

if [ "$dir" = "" ]
then
         echo please provide dmd directory argument
fi

if [ ! -f $dir/$mode.conf ]
then
     echo invalid mode specified -- $mode
fi

rm -f ~/bin/dmd/*
ln -s $dir/dmd ~/bin/dmd/dmd
ln -s $dir/$mode.conf ~/bin/dmd/dmd.conf
hash -d dmd 2>/dev/null


just run it like:

. setupd ~/dmd2.021/dmd/bin

And now from now on, running dmd runs the right dmd with the right config  
file (which is optionally specified).

Stuff like that is so painfully difficult on Windows.

-Steve