[Pdx-pm] traversing (and accessing values in) a hash of hashes

Michael G Schwern schwern at pobox.com
Sun Dec 12 21:25:19 CST 2004


Caveat:  Most of my Windows experience is with Win98.  Its my game plus 
portability testing machine.


On Sun, Dec 12, 2004 at 06:20:06PM -0800, darthsmily wrote:
> Just put of curiosity, have you used the Dos shell in the last 5 years?
> 
> "The world's crappiest pager."
> 
> Not sure what you mean. Do you mean in Edit?

No, I mean something like "less" or "more" on Unix.  Something that you
can run the output of a program through and "page" through the text
with the arrow keys and space bar.  Something you can use to search
through the text.  Something you can use to move both backwards and
forwards through a wad of text.

IIRC the Win98 pager cannot go backwards.  I don't remember if it can
search or not.


> Or do you mean if a bunch of stuff exceede the preset command buffer in 
> the window? Like doing a dir /s?
> Just up the buffer.

Many Perl man pages are hundreds if not thousands of lines long.

Most importantly, if you use the scroll buffer you cannot search within the 
text ("visual grep" does not count).


> "The world's crappiest copy & paste and it always takes me five minutes 
> to remember how to coerce it to allow copy/paste."
> 
> High light right click to copy, right click to paste. Or highlight hit 
> enter to copy.
> Now reminde me, what does one need to do in Linux to copy text out of 
> one shell and paste it in another? Cuse tio always takes me 5 minutes to 
> figure that out. I am thinking it may just be me.

Maybe they finally made this easier in Win2K but I can never get it to work
in any way that makes sense to me in Win98.  All the normal Windows copy/paste
conventions don't seem to apply.


> "No command line history unless you remember to turn it on."
> 
> On by default since at least Win2k 98 sp may have has it on be default, 
> don't remember.

Its not on in Win98 SE.  <shot type=cheap>I'm glad it only took until the
year 2000 to implement this advanced shell feature. ;)</shot>


> "No command suspension."
> 
> You like the pause button? or like the Pause batch command.?

*face in hands*  No.  Like ctrl-z on a Unix shell.  Put one command in
the background, run another in the foreground.  For example, you run
"perldoc perldsc" and it references "perldata".  On Unix you can
suspend your current program (perldoc) by typing (ctrl-z) to get back
to the shell and then run another (perldoc perldata).  Once you're done
with that you can quit or suspend that program and go back to your
first one.

Or you run perldoc, find some code.  Copy it.  Suspend perldoc.  Try the
code out in a one-liner.  Then go back to where you were in perldoc.

Little things like these are the critical reasons why the command line
has perservered in the Unix world.  Doesn't sound like much but they're 
extraordinarily powerful and extremely flexible.  I've found most DOS users 
don't get what's so important about the Unix shell because they don't grok 
features like command suspension, piping and redirection.


-- 
Michael G Schwern        schwern at pobox.com  http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Fuck with me and I will saw off your legs.
        http://www.unamerican.com/


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