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Originally Posted by robcohen
Hey Dennis,
Thanks for the pointers. I must have written the complaint about "no diff" just after I found there was no native DOS diff command (in Vista). Tried the COMP command and it did not actually report the differences, just "files are different sizes". It was a bit annoying to have to go look for a third party version of something that should just be there. I was spoiled by working on Unix many years ago :-)
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<shrug>
I'm a *nix admin, among other things, and had a *nix box at home before I had an MS-DOS PC. I've been keeping my eye out for things that add capabilities I'm used to from Unix to Windows for some time. The links a posted are just a surface scratch, biased toward free/open source.
The topic surfaced elsewhere recently: I'm on the mailing list for NaNoWriMo (an organized effort to write a novel in a month), and various folks involved in it were looking for things like revision control systems they could incorporate in their writing workflow.
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I eventually found and installed a trial of DiffDoc which accomplished the immediate task. Your list of sites for tools gives me way more places to look than downloads.com or simtel.net. Much appreciated.
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Simtel is hit-and-miss, and doesn't seem to be terribly well maintained. A lot of stuff listed proves not to be available. Downloads.com is fine if you know what you're looking for, but less fine if you don't. For *nix like tools, the first place I look is sourceforge.net, the biggest open source repository in existence.
If you want as full an emulation of Unix under Windows as possible, install Cygwin. Cygwin is an attempt by Cygnus Development (now part of Red Hat) to port the Gnu toolchain from *nix to Win32. Rather than rewrite every utility to use Win32 system calls, the Cygnus developers wrote a POSIX compatibility layer encapsulated as a DLL that includes the most common *nix system calls. Code built under Cygwin links against the DLL, sees the *nix calls it expects, and a lot of Unix code builds "out of the box" under Cygwin. Cygwin includes the Gnu compiler suite, plus all of the standard untilites you would expect like ls, cp, mv and ln, plus the vi editor and bash shell. It's a little quirky to use, because it uses *nix conventions, like / as a PATH separator and - as the option delimiter, so you can't jsut mix and match *nix and Windows commands, but it works very well.
Free, and open source, from
http://www.cygwin.com.
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Dennis