John Marlovits wrote:
> At least with Windows you just double click ( with winzip ) and it's done.
As a *n*x zealot, I think this deserves some attention. Lots of people
get this impression when making the jump from Windows to some sort of
Unix, but there's usually a good reason for things that look at first
like missing features or bad design.
Point of order: WinZIP doesn't come with Windows. Last I checked,
Windows did not ship with any compression or archiving utilities at
all. You have to pay for them. (You _ARE_ using a properly registerd
copy of WinZIP, right?)
But that aside, tell me how to do this with WinZIP:
Given a list of files in various subdirectories, compress them, pump
them through a network connection, and re-expand them on some other
machine without storing any temporary files in between.
or,
Take the same list of files, archive them (but don't bother compressing
them) and squirt them to a raw device which does not contain a file
system (such as a tape or unformatted hard disk).
Unless I'm sorely mistaken, WinZIP can't do that. But in the case of
the first example you might say, neither can tar! And you'd be right;
the difference is that tar (and most of the traditional Unix command
line utilities) were written under a very simple interoperability scheme
based around text streaming. So I can easily incorporate tar with other
programs, where each does its own little part of the job and does it
well.
Better yet, because our basic interoperability scheme is all based on
text, I can quickly demonstrate these actions for you in e-mail, with no
screen grabs or lengthy explanations of where to click your mouse or
assumptions about what you'll see on the screen when you do.
Example 1:
$ tar cf - foo/bar baz/* | bzip2 | ssh some.box.com "cat - | bunzip2 |
tar xf - "
or more briefly,
$ tar cjf - foo/bar baz/* | ssh some.box.com "tar xjf -"
(archive the file foo/bar and all the files in the baz/ directory,
compress them, encrypt them, transmit them over the network to
some.box.com, then decrypt, expand, and un-archive them at the other
end. I love that trick.)
Example 2:
$ tar cf /dev/rmt0 /home
(archive the whole home directory onto the tape named /dev/rmt0)
Yes it takes a little learning. No you can't just click once and have
the machine magically know what you want. But this is a reflection of
the state of applied computer science, which Windows and Unix each deal
with in their own way, not necessarily a fault in one system or the
other.
The Windows way is more welcoming to newbies, but quickly becomes
confining if you're used to the powerful Unix scheme. The Unix way
discourages a lot of newbies, but rarely puts up roadblocks once you
have the beginnings of some familiarity with the way things work, and
you don't have to re-learn those basic rules every time you learn a new
utility.
The GNOME and KDE efforts are trying to bridge the gap, and in some
cases they're doing okay. We'll see. I run GNOME but I still spend the
bulk of my real work time in a terminal because it's just so darn
powerful. And when I run Windows I feel as though I'm just not getting
enough air.
Whatever. Geek firehose off.
-m
--
Michael Jinks, IB // Technical Entity // Saecos Corporation
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