Hi:

As an example, consider the command FC.EXE. You want to compare two text files and don't need to know anything about the program. The output speaks for itself. Now consider diff. You must take a course in order for it to be useful. It is not intended to provide information to humans, only to other programs (patches).

Why? I would like to know. You can get a more human readable output with 'diff --minimal --context=1 --ignore-all-space' but, again, you must take the course first in order to learn this.

Quote:

Now consider diff. You must take a course in order for it to be useful. It is not intended to provide information to humans, only to other programs (patches).

Not true.

It doesn't need to take a 'course' in order to learn something you can completely learn even from the terminal manuals itself.

1. Under windows everything has to be given Ready-To-Use (RTU) since you are "Paying" it for a great price; whereas, under FOSS (Gnu/Linux-BSD-*nix) everything is FREE, both as in Freedom and as in Free-beer, even the freedom to manipulate the scripts to tailor the output according to your taste.

2. Under windows it is an '*.exe' binary (they always hide sources and project a sense of mystery to the unwitting user to encourage TOTAL dependence to the company on matters computing); whereas under FOSS OS's those simple terminal commands are the play things of the user and the normal user (as compared to a lazy one) is expected to learn as the need arises to him, to learn from abundant sources of FREE information through the cyberworld (like this one we have in LQ) and nothing to worry about copyright violation whatever.

3. All that FC.EXE can do is easily attainable by a simple beginner's script of bash commands.

4. What you might call "a course" is not something you formally get into by enrolling in (let alone your employment of metaphor). You have plenty of tutorials free, not for sale, and plenty of fora and help communities that by now have ready answers to your sought out solution, more than what an FC.EXE is all about.

5. If there is ever something in windows to be called as 'nice' is its total support of drivers from OEMs. Other than that, all Microsoft OS (except Windows 95) is a piece of expensive garbage.

Quote:

Why? I would like to know.

Just like any other questions from ex-Microsoft-buyer/user, the answer is............

/ * IT LIES ON YOUR RESOURCEFULNESS AND YOUR SEARCHING (GOOGLING) ABILITY * /

Hope this helps.

Do you agree that diff was thought as a tools to ease patches?

Disagree: if you have 2 text files called "left" and "right" you need and you can see lines of
< this is in file "left"
> this is in file "right"

and that's sometimes all you need.

As an example, consider the command kompare. You want to compare two text files and don't need to know anything about the program.

Alright, but I was speaking about cli programs. After all, FC.EXE is a cli program, no need to start the GUI. But thanks for the info anyway.

Unix came with a fantastic set of text processing tools. These tools, varying from the simple to the complex (and each individual tool can be used as simple or complex) are useful to many, from the novelist, through the technical documentation writer, to the developer. The concepts of the operating system and its utilities have stood the test of, what, over thirty years? The were developed by people with the most incredible minds in the business. No, not in the business: in the whole sphere of computer science. The current state of Linux suggests that those concepts will last a long, long time.

DOS/Windows was never anything more than a shadow, developed under a restrictive commercial initiative; if you want the tools, go buy them. It still rules the desktop, partly because of the entrenched popularity of some of its programs (hey, I still prefer Excel <Blush>). What's nice about it, as stated, is never having to worry when you buy hardware. As a person interested in computer audio, this is a big bugbear for me: many of the manufacturers are simply not interested in my choice of Linux.

diff and sdiff were among the first tools I ever used in my early days. I cannot agree that they need a course to understand, any more than the DOS command line tool do.

Even when stuff does get difficult, some enterprising person will often provide a simple solution, even one with a graphic interface. One of my favourites is fslint. It is amazingly powerful, amazingly fast --- and it is built of the *nix tools of which we speak. It is powered by shell scripts that I do not even begin to understand.

Sure but there are loads of command line comparison programs on Linux (mcdiff, colordiff, git diff, etc.). What does the output of FC.exe look like? What do you consider a good visual comparison?

How about a coloured word diff with git (the files do not need to be under revision control) e.g.:

I am sure you can find something that does things just as well if not better (this kind of stuff is actually where *nix excels).

Yes, some things in Windows are very nice. Personally, I'm a fanboi of the Off button. Definitely Windows best feature.

The answer is actually pretty simple. FC.EXE is a remnant from DOS. DOS was a cheap clone of CP/M, an OS meant to be run on home-computers and office machines by more or less untrained people.
Unix on the other hand was invented with the purpose to be a programming environment in the first place. So people using Unix were usually people that were trained at least a bit in computer sciences and had no problem to read and understand a manual page.

You go, read the man page and tell me if it is of any use. There's the info page. But believe me, you'll still need a course on diff. Basically, what I said it's true. Diff output was not thought to be human readable much machine readable.

On the other hand, I've been programming since my twenties, and consider myself clever enough to deal with such trivial stuff.

Actually, just being able to read is enough. Worked for me
Again, it worked for me.

One thing I often wish I still had is one of the physical Unix man-page sets that I originally learnt all this stuff from. It would be a problem that versions and implementations differ, especially over decades, and maybe it is only those decades that make me think they were often better than the current gnu/linux pages. And that permutated index was wonderful!

At the end of the day (or, err... any time...) use the tool that suits you. Nobody can tell you that it was the wrong one.

Still missing the main point. It has been thought as a tool to ease patches.

It is. It tells me to use the -y option to get a nice side-by-side output that is intended to be human readable.
If you want to see only the differences use it in conjunction with --suppress-common-lines.
Or just use one of the other tools installed in a default Slackware install, like vimdiff or mcdiff.

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