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October 12, 2004
Geek Toolbox
Every Geek or Geek wannabe should have unix emulation tools on their Windows PC.
I am one of those folks who is jammed between my Linux and Windows PC's. On the Linux box, I run Perl, code prototype applications, whip scripts together for file processing - quickly and efficiently at a command line.
I've tried "Gnome" as the xwindows client, but can't really get into it. My UI sensibility has been overrun in the last 10 years by Microsoft. There are lots o' things I can complain about with Microsoft, but on UI, I have to say, I'm conditioned.
That's the other side of my world. Office Productivity. Email. Presentations. Spreadsheets. Word docs. Graphic Design. Sure, I could do all these things with free, opensource projects on Linux - but, really, honestly, I just can't.
Today's world, for me and I suspect many like me, require both. Or maybe I'm the odd duck. Either way, I recommend merging your OS environs just a tad.
I'm not even sure who to credit for these - a wise old geek gave this to me years ago - most of the commands are dated 1995, some 1993.
http://www.tombartel.com/unixemulator.zip
There are some downright handy Unix commands in this zip. On a windows system, just dump these in /winnt/system32 or /windows/system32 or somewhere in your %path%.
Just today, (with Robert's assistance - thanks Robert) I piped grep to uniq to sort to garner some numbers out of a massively borked file a client sent over. A 32 MB .rtf file that had malformed CRLF's in it, once I converted those with EditPlus (another geek requirement, WELL WORTH the cost - $30 bucks or so) and ran some formatting regexes, I used my handy unix ems to get the numbers I needed.
Didn't even have to shove this 32 MB file back and forth between Windows and Linux machines (Meanwhile Outlook 2003 choked to death on a 7MB text email because of he @#%$# preview pane - lost 45 minutes on that one, but that's another story...).
Had an answer to client in a jiffy. Go ahead, download and play and geek out a while. There are lots of fun commands in there.
Posted by gcrgcr at October 12, 2004 11:37 PM
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