Yep. The tools you need are known as "Bash" and "grep". :-)

Find information about the former here, and download it thus. Grep you may download with this link. Most of the other GNU command line tools are available too, if you poke around.

With sufficient work, Windows can be made much more tolerable for Unix folks. Kind of amusing, too. Hard to tell which people think is weirder... your running something they've never seen before, or your sitting there with four DOS windows open, and the mouse laying forgotten somewhere.

I think they are all severely lacking (OSs). I mainly use Linux/Gnome or Linux/Windowmaker. The first combination gives a lot that a non-programmer should rightly demand from a modern operating system and desktop environment while the second combination doesn't.

KDE2 is out for the last couple of weeks and is very useable by all accounts. The fact that there is competition between the Gnome and KDE teams (and there is competition than any of the developers will openly admin to) spurs them both on to bigger and better things.

These are fairly fundamental parts of human nature and as a result economics. Monopolies ultimately fall on their own sword and die. It is a fact of life. It doesn't mean the Microsoft is bad. It doesn't mean that Microsoft will disappear. It just means that there will and should be choices, competition and freedom.

As seen in a sig recently; thirty years of computer science research and all we've got to show for it is a talking paperclip.

You have identified what I see as the Achilles' Heel of Linux: at least on Windows, there arent two different GUI APIs and all GUI software for a particular Windows platform will work for all machines on that platform.

With Linux, you may be in GUI hog heaven one day only to find out that the next thing you need has only been written for the other Window System.

Yes, having two desktop environments complicates matters as you have to decide which one to develop for but it all balances out in the end. Diversity and balance insist that this is so.

If someone doesn't like some open source code they just rewrite it. I see similarities between this approach to software development and the feedback mechanisms employed by nature. Many parts of a human body rely on feedback mechanisms and emulating nature is all we ever really do.

Personally, I just read the rest of the error message where it says "in line <x>" then look over at my text editor in the next window and scroll down to that line...then there's only one possibility of where the error is.

If you're a *nix geek stuck on Windows, I highly recommend Cygwin32. It really is the most amazing thing. Gives you everything you ever wanted from Unix, right on your NT machine (except the stability...that you'll never get from windows; but Cygwin itself is pretty stable).