What is on Your Mind?

Hi figaro...

Absolutely. I am new to it, and it probably shows too, but try and do even half of what the Scope does in a Windows, (TM), Command Prompt.
It is possible but it is seriously difficult.

Ah, but as an amateur I see it differently. How many coders like me are interested in single file sizes 100's or 1000's of MegaBytes in size?

Hi DGPickett...

I have veered away from ANSI C and C++ and base most of my non-shell scripting time in Python. I try to write code that works on version 1.4.x to current on Classic AMIGAs, (usually a stock A1200), Linux, Windows and now OSX. Most of it is on code.activestate.com but some is on AMINET...
This I find a mental challenge as there is so much to know and learn about the various platforms.

Isn't that supposed to be the purpose of Windows Power Shell?

I've never used it, I'm genuinely wondering.

Hi verdepollo...

I have been experimenting with Powershell and it is still highly limited.
Commands are one thing but manipulating text on screen is something else again...
(Unless of course I have missed something.)

What the *NIX family of OSes take for granted is not possible inside a defauilt 32 bit Windows command prompt...

The Escape sequences - such as multicolors per text line and plotting at any point within the command window.

Even HW problems when _refreshing_ the CLI window at _high_speed_ causes a pseudo-flicker inside the CLI window...

There are workarounds for some aspects but to generate the same image for the Scope project is not possible as you cannot have more than 2 colours from a CMD.EXE window.

i suspect you know this already though...

It surprises me that the Classic AMIGA can use many of the *NIX escape codes and works inside its default CLI but that Windows is oh, so, backwards...

Well, PERL and JAVA are pretty transparently portable including Windows, or you can get CygWin and bash away.

Code that will work fine in UNIX may have problems in windows. Something that crops up often enough in cygwin is failed fork() calls... UNIX will let you create thousands of short-lived processes without complaining, windows will hiccup once in a while. I consider this a bug in windows. It's not 10,000 live process after all, or even 10,000 dead ones, it's 10,000 processes that have already died and been reaped, but there's still some buffer or queue deep inside windows which it hasn't bothered to clear, and instead of doing so it gives you the occasional inexplicable error. You can reorganize your code to make less processes and it "usually" works but there's no way to be sure it always will.

Yes, CygWin fork/exec is slow at best. I have not had fork failures, but I keep my VM tuned to accomodate unexpected big. And I script to get the most out of every fork. No grep shell out just to examine the contents of a variable from every line. On UNIX, fork() is remarkably quik, and they have special cut down fork for exec immediately cases. The exec takes 10 times as long as fork, so what people call fork time is really exec time.