Re: effing Nader

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:35:46 +0000, Bernard Peek <bap@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In message <slrndtc6md.rr.andyl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Andy Leighton
><andyl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>>
>>But even after selecting all your thousands of files how are you going
>>to do a mass operation like in Keith's example.
>
> In Windows, right-click on one of the selected files and pick an option
> from the context menu or pick the files up and drop them on a program
> icon.

The problem is that there isn't any program that will do what Keith
did in his example - without writing a specific script.

After all if the GUI was sufficient why is Microsoft introducing
Monad (btw - the second attempt they have had at a way of scripting
Windows) and why does Apple have OSA?

But mostly this is a difference in philosophy.

The Unix way is pipes and streams which is quite difficult to emulate in
a graphical way (but not impossible). I think a couple of GUIs have tried
approaches where data could be shoveled around arbitrary programs such as
you can do with unix pipelines. However I seriously doubt it took less
input effort than a unix shell.

Most GUI implementations (and programs that run on them) take a different
view. They tend to want to work on individual concrete files. They do
not allow the wiring together of small pieces of functionality.

For instance say I have a log file for every day this week and I want to
catenate them into one big log file for the week and then delete the
individual daily logs and then compress the weekly log. To me this doesn't
seem an outrageous or contrived thing to do. It is very easy using a Unix
shell (or indeed any other scripting language or most command line tools).
Using a GUI it is somewhat more cumbersome and more prone to problems.

--
Andy Leighton => andyl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
.

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