An end to tweaking Approved: yes

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 09:01:52 -0700, comp.os.spil

Doinganythingrecursive with DOS batch makes my head hurt. ;) It was a very, very sparse language indeed, and perhaps the best that could be said about it is that going from DOS batch to VMS is easier than going from the average Unix shell to VMS.

But who needs to move to VMS these days?

True. And yes, bash (the default shell under Linux) ismuchbetter than DOS batch. For example:

# Mbutt-convert all .gif files in the current directory to .png files.

for i in *.gif # Iterate over all files that end in .gif. do n=`basename $i .gif` # Remove the extension. done

You can save that to a file and it will be a first-clbutt command from then on. You don't need to care that it's written in shell instead of C or Perl or COBOL. You can write it all out on the command-line, too, if you don't expect you'll ever need to mbutt-convert .gifs to .pngs again.

(Pardon me if I ramble for a while. I don't know if DOS batch had pipes.)

That last command bears some extra commentary: It is actually two programs, one feeding data to the other without needing to create a temporary file on disk. Piping information around is a huge advantage of the Unix command line environment.

The names come with time. You can create aliases and hide them behind obfuscation, but in the long run it's better to learn the actual commands.

And you can indeed call a shell script anything you want. That is certainly what I am doing, at any rate.

Yes, yes, and yes. :)

(Some shells are better than others, but a discussion of that inevitably ends in flamewar. I personally like zsh, others swear by ksh, and some think bash is best. A few prefer tcsh, but the tcsh programming language is completely different from what I've shown you.)

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