3 ms·

I'm sure you know, but there are many ways to get GNU grep or similar programs running on Windows. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-

• dredmorbius 14y ago
  Sure, there are ways to get various Linux-like tools on Windows, or Mac. But inevitably -- and I've been using Windows offerings since the mid 1990s and Mac for the past 6-7 years -- these are nowhere near as complete as what you'll find in native Linux, they're missing key bits, polish and bugs are less than optimal, host integration isn't what it is in Linux, host features lack key Linux bits (especially /proc and /sys, and all that they enable), and if you want full coverage, you'll almost always end up with several different toolsets none of which offer quite what I'm looking for. And you're missing soup-to-nuts, all-encompassing, sane, bug-reporting-integrated package management. On other systems, I manage bits of my Linux-like environment through better or worse (Cygwin -- don't get me started -- but look at apt-cygwin) package management. But most of my OS is outside of that. Inside Debian, I might manage a very small handful of non-packaged software items, mostly browser plugins. Oh, and lately Ruby gems, which are their own brand of hell, but whatever. I first switched to Linux when I realized that I was spending more and more of my time trying to make Windows NT look like what I got out of the box with a $30 Linux distro CD (bundled with a book). Other than a few distro hops (last to Debian, in the late 1990s, though I continue to evaluate / work with others), I've never looked back.