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Speaking of Reasons to Hate Windows...

The thing that most frustrates me about Windows is its lack of command-line remote administration. You can hack it in via OpenSSH for Windows but it’s far from perfect -- you can’t use any interactive commands because of problems with STDIN/STDOUT mapping, which cuts out a pretty large swath of the programs you’d like to run. And it lacks tab-completion as well as command history; pressing the Up key actually makes the cursor move up on the screen.

Even if it worked perfectly, Microsoft makes some things impossible via command line. For example, I recently discovered that you can use Scheduled Tasks (in the Control Panel) to run a program at boot without having it attached to a window. That’s awesome for background programs that you’d like to keep running all the time but that you don’t really want cluttering up your taskbar because they take no user input (like Eponym). But there’s no equivalent command-line way to access the Scheduled Tasks functionality. There’s "at" but it can’t schedule an event at boot nor multiple times per day. There’s "schtasks" which actually IS equivalent to Scheduled Tasks in the Control Panel, but it’s not included in XP Home.

The unxutils package improves the situation drastically, giving you lots of the most handy Unix tools like grep and wget. And of course you can use VNC to do remote administration via the full Windows GUI. But that’s inconvenient because most internet links are slow, and because you often can’t or don’t want to take over a system that someone else might be using just to do a task that should only require the command-line anyway.

I say that MS should take after Apple: admit that the only thing going for their OS is its nice looks and ease-of-GUI-use, and then get to work building that on top of a REAL OS with nice internals (i.e. Linux or BSD).

And also, Superunknown is still a really good album.

Posted by Anthony on Mar 3, 2005 | 7 replies
Filed under: Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Software, Tech

Comments:

01. Mar 4, 2005 at 08:54am by Kev:

"For example, I recently discovered that you can use Scheduled Tasks (in the Control Panel) to run a program at boot without having it attached to a window."
Do you know if that an XP specific thing or is it possible in 2000? I could find a few uses for that on my 2000 system at work.
You’re probably already aware of it, buy Cygwin is also a way to make Windows more Unix-y (making Windows suck less, in other words); it has Unix commands compiled to run on Windows.
"I say that MS should take after Apple: admit that the only thing going for their OS is its nice looks and ease-of-GUI-use, and then get to work building that on top of a REAL OS with nice internals (i.e. Linux or BSD)."
It’s already known that Microsoft uses BSD code in some of their operating systems (think about the TCP/IP stack for starters), but it would be better if the core of the whole system was BSD, much like Mac OS X. Stability and security are 2 things Windows would gain right off the bat. As for using Linux as the ’internals,’ I don’t think that is a feasible option for Microsoft, since they will not want to release source code, as required by the GPL. The BSD allows them to take and not give back code, which seems more suited to their style anyway.

02. Mar 4, 2005 at 09:56am by Anthony:

Good call on GPL vs. BSDL. I’d be shocked if MS ever went that route at all, but if they did, the GPL wouldn’t allow them to release the OS to the public without open-sourcing it. I just wasn’t thinking that micro.

Regarding the scheduled-task-at-boot, I don’t have access to a W2K system, so I don’t know. I know that on XP, it just has "When my computer starts" as an option for the time during the create-new-task wizard, and "At Startup" in the drop-down box when you’re editing the properties for an exisitng task. So I tried it, and found that as soon as the system is up enough to SSH into, the task was running, and after logging it, there wasn’t any window created for the process.

I have used Cygwin, but it has always been a pain to install, and taken a really long time (like 30-60 minutes) to install, not to mention taking a few hundred megs to a gig of space. OpenSSHWin is actually based on Cygwin (uses the cygwin dll, etc), but it installs such a small subset of it that the installation is super fast and easy. And the unxutils package provides pre-built Windows binaries for a few dozen common Unix apps, giving me most/all of the Unix functionality that I’d really want from Cygwin but without any of the hassle (just drop them all into c:\windows).

03. Mar 4, 2005 at 11:15am by Kev:

FYI: it can be done on 2000. There’s a wizard that walks you through and it’s pretty straight-forward. Definitely cool. Now I can automate a few things.
This is the equivalent of me appending the /path/to/a/script to /etc/rc.local on my Fedora/RedHat systems.

04. Mar 4, 2005 at 04:35pm by Anthony:

Cool. Or, the equivalent of "crontab -e" and then "@reboot /path/to/a/script" for a normal user to run a command at boot, if you don’t have root access.

05. Mar 4, 2005 at 05:14pm by Kev:

Does that run the script before it reboots, or when it comes back up from a reboot? The ’@reboot’ is why I’m asking. I never heard of that method, which seems equally cool.

06. Mar 4, 2005 at 05:24pm by Anthony:

@reboot in a crontab runs the command when the system comes up.

07. Mar 5, 2005 at 01:36pm by Kev:

Thanks for that info, more to add to my personal knowledgebase. Just to add more fuel to the fire, I have a post on my site which is a kind of ’other’ reason to hate windows, and to use Firefox. Here’s the shameless link: Lengthy Explanation: Do Not Use Microsoft Internet Explorer!

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