I'd have replied in private mail, but Mr. Embarassing here can't be reached by mail... anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com says:
Well, maybe unix gets its reputation for being hostile because of things like
* many commands don't work fully (find, for example)
Haven't found a bug in find since '85.
* a large portion choke on input that isn't "expected"
Such as?
* many more do extremely poor input checking,
Such as?
* the configuration files are bizarre
Yup. Shell scripts as the startup scripts for the machine are really hard to understand. The simple list of newsgroup names to configure the news readers are impossible to grok, too. Not.
* different version have command with different options (stty everything, ps -ef vs. ps -aux, etc.)
And of course, DOS has never added options to new versions of the system.
* each version is slightly different (ever try porting a non-trivial program?
Yup. Recently, I ported about 80,000 lines of code in a day. It wasn't much of a challenge -- because I knew how to program, of course. I had to hack some compatibility libraries, and it took about another day and a half to back-patch the original sources so that the program compiled without problems on both architectures.
Hell, look at the "config" program that comes with PERL - 80K of stuff to build a make file for the flavor of UNIX you are using!)
Thats because its fully automated. Would you prefer to do the job by hand? Remember, Unix handles things that PCs never even dreamed of -- like endianness considerations, which you don't get if you are chained by the ankle to one shitty processor.
* the commands don't combine well (often uuencode + sendmail == garbage)
I've never seen that, but then again I'm just on drugs. Naturally, of course, no DOS programs have ever crapped out.
* many commands accept a slightly different regular expression syntax than the shell does
The shell doesn't accept regular expression syntax, so this shouldn't be the least bit suprising.
* the commands aren't built with ease of use in mind. For example, to kill a process under unix requires that I know it's process id.
Not at all true -- you can use skill, or if a process is a current job you can do stuff in most shells like kill %procname
ever hear of X windows?
X-Windows is an extreme pain to get working. Sure, if you buy your unix workstation the manufacturer will pre-install it. Just try setting it up from scratch.
So buy it precompiled. Lots of people sell it that way. I can't imagine that Windows would be easy to install if you got it in source form. .pm