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This is a weird article. It ignores powershell entirely and I really disagree about cygwin being this bloaty and difficult thing to install. If you just want ba

This is a weird article. It ignores powershell entirely and I really disagree about cygwin being this bloaty and difficult thing to install. If you just want basic unix utilities then cygwin is a breeze to install and use. On top of it, you can download compilations of standard gnu unix untils at sourceforge compiled for windows. I have a standard unixutils folder on the c: root of the drive of all my computers so I can easily access stuff like wget, netcat, grep, etc. Works well enough.

eamann 13y ago
Scripting in Powershell is nothing like scripting in Bash. I like and use Powershell on a daily basis - but can't re-use my PS scripts on a Mac because the shells are nothing alike. The point was to achieve OS parity. For a newcomer, no, Cygwin is not a breeze to install and use. The documentation is abysmal, the download takes forever (unless you know ahead of time which tools to install and which to omit), knowing which packages to install to enable specific features is impossible for someone without experience, and there is no native uninstaller.
- drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  Why is this person even bothering to use windows instead of running a unixy desktop plus wine or Windows in a VM? For your requirements, its asinine to buy a windows box. If you're working in windows, might as well spend 20 minutes learning the basics of powershell. Not sure why this is a controversial suggestion. Leave windows if its all too bothersome.
  - cgh 13y ago
    This is directly addressed in the article. He is a .Net developer.
    - csmuk 13y ago
      So am I for pay cheque reasons. For the sake of sanity though, I use Linux with a windows VM.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Sometimes you also need programs that don't have good Linux versions and bad Wine support. I tend to find GUI heavy applications are a pain to use in a VM.
csmuk 13y ago
Agree, apart from PowerShell which is a bastardised mutant crawling snail spawn of satan. It's like using a VAX 11/780 over a 300bps dialup. SMS messages have a higher throughput. This is almost entirely because it uses the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection.
- nailer 13y ago
  > the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection That's true, PowerShell is slower than bash. It does more, and that has a cost. That said: it's by far the best designed shell in terms of syntax, and actually separating presentation from logic. Eg, print me a list of processes started in the last hour (from memory, I don't normally use Windows) ps | ? StartTime -gt $1HourAgo | kill Notice the lack of silly things like creating regexs to represent time? Unix shells are MS Word. Powershell is LaTeX.
  - angersock 13y ago
    And look at all the people who use LaTeX! (This is pretty much a textbook example of the New Jersey worse-is-better style...fitting, since it involves Unix directly.)
  - csmuk 13y ago
    Absolutely not. It's terrible. Some more reasons to hate it: 1. It can throw a message box or prompt on the screen without any notice. Precisely how this is handled from a scheduled task is "interesting". 2. If you're non US locale, you get different date formats pop out of get-date, gci and CLR DateTime. This at some points in time scares the living fuck out of me as an implicit cast to string can swap day/month around. 3. Changes every year or two. Features features features. Gotta learn them all. Pokemon time. 4. Module system is a piece of shit. 5. Signing is so friction inducing that everyone just turns it off to get shit done. you compare to bash here. Bash doesn't do much at all. This is the point. It leverages other tools to do the work. In your example you mention regex for parsing dates. This is a bad approach. "date +%s" returns sortable integers which you should work with. PowerShell is Word. LaTeX is a felt tip. Bash is a fountain pen and a steady hand.
runjake 13y ago
It's not a weird article at all. And from what you posted, you didn't even read it. The author mentioned in the very beginning of the article that they wanted something that would work cleanly across their other (*NIX) platforms. Powershell, while fantastic, is not cross-platform. And Cygwin does some funny stuff that also makes client configuration a bit of extra work if you're, again, dealing with multiple platforms.
- joemi 13y ago
  To be pedantic, the article mentions that he's using "the Windows command line", and not Bash. So Powershell's non-cross-platformness does not seem to be breaking his goals any more than that.
  - runjake 13y ago
    To be further pedantic, the article is about maintain a relatively-close command line environment between Windows, Linux, and OS X. The parent commenter failed to notice this.
  - lucb1e 13y ago
    (I haven't read the article yet) What, it doesn't recommend bash but the default Windows shell? That's really weird, bash makes the shell by itself 10 times more versatile, regardless of what commands are available. Edit: > using a text-only interface is extremely foreign. Oh I see, he's newb (as in the normal meaning of the word, not mocking). That explains.
mmagin 13y ago
For me, what's horrible about Cygwin is that a lot of things that perform just fine on a normal Unix are horribly slow. Just try running an Autoconf "configure" script sometime. I'm told this is because emulating fork() is very expensive in Windows (in contrast to the Unix model where it's very cheap.)

eamann 13y ago

Scripting in Powershell is nothing like scripting in Bash. I like and use Powershell on a daily basis - but can't re-use my PS scripts on a Mac because the shells are nothing alike. The point was to achieve OS parity. For a newcomer, no, Cygwin is not a breeze to install and use. The documentation is abysmal, the download takes forever (unless you know ahead of time which tools to install and which to omit), knowing which packages to install to enable specific features is impossible for someone without experience, and there is no native uninstaller.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago
Why is this person even bothering to use windows instead of running a unixy desktop plus wine or Windows in a VM? For your requirements, its asinine to buy a windows box. If you're working in windows, might as well spend 20 minutes learning the basics of powershell. Not sure why this is a controversial suggestion. Leave windows if its all too bothersome.
- cgh 13y ago
  This is directly addressed in the article. He is a .Net developer.
  - csmuk 13y ago
    So am I for pay cheque reasons. For the sake of sanity though, I use Linux with a windows VM.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Sometimes you also need programs that don't have good Linux versions and bad Wine support. I tend to find GUI heavy applications are a pain to use in a VM.

csmuk 13y ago

Agree, apart from PowerShell which is a bastardised mutant crawling snail spawn of satan. It's like using a VAX 11/780 over a 300bps dialup. SMS messages have a higher throughput. This is almost entirely because it uses the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection.

nailer 13y ago
> the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection That's true, PowerShell is slower than bash. It does more, and that has a cost. That said: it's by far the best designed shell in terms of syntax, and actually separating presentation from logic. Eg, print me a list of processes started in the last hour (from memory, I don't normally use Windows) ps | ? StartTime -gt $1HourAgo | kill Notice the lack of silly things like creating regexs to represent time? Unix shells are MS Word. Powershell is LaTeX.
- angersock 13y ago
  And look at all the people who use LaTeX! (This is pretty much a textbook example of the New Jersey worse-is-better style...fitting, since it involves Unix directly.)
- csmuk 13y ago
  Absolutely not. It's terrible. Some more reasons to hate it: 1. It can throw a message box or prompt on the screen without any notice. Precisely how this is handled from a scheduled task is "interesting". 2. If you're non US locale, you get different date formats pop out of get-date, gci and CLR DateTime. This at some points in time scares the living fuck out of me as an implicit cast to string can swap day/month around. 3. Changes every year or two. Features features features. Gotta learn them all. Pokemon time. 4. Module system is a piece of shit. 5. Signing is so friction inducing that everyone just turns it off to get shit done. you compare to bash here. Bash doesn't do much at all. This is the point. It leverages other tools to do the work. In your example you mention regex for parsing dates. This is a bad approach. "date +%s" returns sortable integers which you should work with. PowerShell is Word. LaTeX is a felt tip. Bash is a fountain pen and a steady hand.

runjake 13y ago

It's not a weird article at all. And from what you posted, you didn't even read it. The author mentioned in the very beginning of the article that they wanted something that would work cleanly across their other (*NIX) platforms. Powershell, while fantastic, is not cross-platform. And Cygwin does some funny stuff that also makes client configuration a bit of extra work if you're, again, dealing with multiple platforms.

joemi 13y ago
To be pedantic, the article mentions that he's using "the Windows command line", and not Bash. So Powershell's non-cross-platformness does not seem to be breaking his goals any more than that.
- runjake 13y ago
  To be further pedantic, the article is about maintain a relatively-close command line environment between Windows, Linux, and OS X. The parent commenter failed to notice this.
- lucb1e 13y ago
  (I haven't read the article yet) What, it doesn't recommend bash but the default Windows shell? That's really weird, bash makes the shell by itself 10 times more versatile, regardless of what commands are available. Edit: > using a text-only interface is extremely foreign. Oh I see, he's newb (as in the normal meaning of the word, not mocking). That explains.

mmagin 13y ago

For me, what's horrible about Cygwin is that a lot of things that perform just fine on a normal Unix are horribly slow. Just try running an Autoconf "configure" script sometime. I'm told this is because emulating fork() is very expensive in Windows (in contrast to the Unix model where it's very cheap.)