Questions about DOS (sorry if off-topic)

[Gaijin]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 03:44:50PM -0400, Eleni Vamvakari wrote:
> For the record, I've never used unix or Linux.

	Well, if you like 4DOS, imagine UNIX/Linux as 4DOS on steroids, 
adrenaline, and crank. <grins> I took one good look at the bash shell 
prompt and have never looked back.  There is absolutely no comparison.  
4DOS doesn't hold a candle to the UNIX shell's batch processing 
capabilities.  Imagine an operating system that will run a batch file 
before, during, and after making a 56K modem connection just for 
starters, not to mention init, Linux's autoexec.bat and config.sys 
system that not only is already set up for you to run just about 
everything you can find in Linux (over 20,000 software packages for both 
the CLI and the GUI), but will also shut down the system for you 
properly.  Imagen a system with different run levels so you can boot 
multiple configurations.  Imagine having the utilities to write one line 
of script that will modify 2500 web pages for you in a couple seconds, 
however you want them modified, and be able to make the command what is 
called a "cron job" that can be run for you at any time or date.  Great 
if you want to automatically switch your website over to xmas 
decorations on December 1st, and back again to the way it was on January 
1st.  Imagine a web interface called wget that can go and get a web page 
from Yahoo Finance, trace down individual page links for stock prices, 
extract those prices and input them into an SQL database for you, and 
wake each morning to find a sorted list of the most profitable stocks on 
the market.  Imagine being able to do all this for free, and being able 
to upgrade *ALL* of your software with a single command.  No hunting 
around the internet for new versions of your programs or their bug 
fixes.  Linux has a steep learning curve for a reason.  It's a true 
multiuser, server quality, supercomputer operating system that's about 
as complete as it's possible to make it.

	I truly understand why you love DOS, but if you take a look at 
Linux and read only a few of the hundreds of available documents on it, 
like me, you may ditch DOS in a heartbeat. 

				Michael

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