That said, it does lead into another “classic example” of how Bash can (only occasionally, but definitely occasionally) be harder to use: list all .flac files in *any* subdirectory of where you are now, not just one level down.

In cmd, it’s easy; ‘dir /s *.flac’ as John said. In Bash… well, until recently, you have to use find. ‘find . -name “*.flac”‘. find is one of those utilities that is not exactly easy to learn to use… even for simple queries like that, for a while I was using ‘find . | grep “.flac”‘.

In other words, you had to completely change the program you’re calling. ls can list files by pattern (‘ls *.flac’), and ls can list a directory recursively (‘ls -R’), but you can’t combine the two tasks with ls itself. (Of course the reason is that it wasn’t really ls that was listing files by pattern, it was the shell.)

A similar thing comes up with the following task: search through all .c files in a subdirectory of the current one for a particular string “foo”. In Bash: ‘find -name “*.c” -print0 | xargs -0 grep -H foo’. (You could also do the same thing with {}, but I never remember how to use that syntax.) There’s a bunch of different gotchas in that. In addition to figuring out the general idea in the first place, if you leave off the -print0 and -0, file names with spaces will cause it to fail. If you leave off the -H, you’ll see matching lines, but you’ll have no idea what file they’re in. In Windows, ‘findstr /s REACHABLE *.c’. The only thing additional you have to do to make the search recursive is add /s.

(GNU grep contains the ‘–include’ flag; paired with –recursive is the *right* way to do this search now. However, this is a relatively recent addition.)

You get used to this after a while — recursive queries take find — but for a newcomer, it can be hard for a while.

(Finally, Bash 4 introduced the ** feature which mostly obviates my immediate arguments above. ‘ls **/*.flac’ and ‘grep foo **/*.c’ now do what you want, as long as you don’t overrun the command line length. (OTOH, this *is* sometimes a real problem.) However, this is a *very* recent addition to Bash, with Bash 4 being less than a year old. Zsh has had it for longer, but no one uses it for some reason despite it kicking the pants off of Bash.)

Try
dir /s *.flac
dir /s /b *.flac
will keep it from showing file size, etc.

G:\music>dir/w
Volume in drive G has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 4786-4F2F

Directory of G:\music

[.] [..]
[{2005} Octavarium [FLAC]] [{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]]
[misc]
0 File(s) 0 bytes
5 Dir(s) 694,267,904 bytes free

G:\music>dir *\*.flac
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

Now, compare and contrast to the equivalent in bash:

goten@r2d3:~/tmp15$ ls
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC] {2005} Octavarium [FLAC] misc
goten@r2d3:~/tmp15$ ls */*.flac
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]/[°1] The Glass Prison.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[03] These Walls.flac
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]/[°2] Blind Faith.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[04] I Walk Beside You.flac
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]/[°3] Misunderstood.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[05] Panic Attack.flac
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]/[°4] The Great Debate.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[06] Never Enough.flac
{2002} Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence [FLAC]/[°5] Disappear.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[07] Sacrificed Sons.flac
{2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[01] The Root of All Evil.flac {2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[08] Octavarium.flac
{2005} Octavarium [FLAC]/[02] The Answer Lies Within.flac

Second, Linux can use Windows domains quite easily and act as a domain controller itself. Please, if you are going to be a paid shill at least be honest and upfront.

Not to mention backticks, decent redirection (2>/dev/null), and such.

The author manages to completely miss the point regarding package management. For example: what is the equivalent of ‘apt-get upgrade’?

Maybe the Windows-Updates facility has been automated (and maybe not). But it does not update any thinrd-party product installed. Because without a repository the system does not know where to pull updates from.

Now do that on 100 workstations.

Windows PowerShell

Blog of Windows PowerShell team

I’d also like to mention a hidden gem, LogParser.

I have written a set of articles on how Linux power users can get by in the windows world:
Advanced Cygwin:
http://ergo.rydlr.net/?p=4

PuttyCyg – The authentic console for Cygwin
http://ergo.rydlr.net/?p=3