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Coreutils for Windows

github.com

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Re: Coreutils for Windows

#91

Post by Dwedit »

chasil wrote: post #85
jakegmaths wrote: post #30

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX. In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough. WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when con…

Windows is also a rare bird in UTF-16. "UTF-16 is used by the Windows API, and by many programming environments such as Java and Qt. The variable-length character of UTF-16, combined with the fact that most characters are not variable-length (so variable length is rarely tested), has led to many bugs in software, including in Windows itself. "UTF-16 is the only encoding (still) allowed on the web that is incompatible…

UTF-16 is also used by C#, Java, and JavaScript. Since JavaScript is so widely adopted, I wouldn't call it a rare bird. Not necessarily used when reading or writing files, but it's what's used internally for the strings. As a result, your strings use UTF-16 surrogate pairs to represent characters outside of the basic multilingual plane (such as Emoji).

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#93

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

jakegmaths wrote: post #30

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX. In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough. WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when con…

Most (everything?) on Windows actually works with forward slashes. However, much of the tooling will overwrite your version with a backslash wherever it can.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#94

Post by spider-mario »

ilotoki0804 wrote: post #84

You can install gnu-compative shell commands when installing git for Windows. It even includes useful unix utilites like bash, so check it out if you're interested. More project information: https://gitforwindows.org/ Official download: https://git-scm.com/install/windows

Or MSYS2, to go even further. https://www.msys2.org/

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#95

Post by Dwedit »

avidphantasm wrote: post #67
jakegmaths wrote: post #30

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX. In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough. WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when con…

No, they need to ditch drive letters first. The NT kernel and NTFS don't even require them (I used to mount disks without drive letters back in the NT 4 era). They just don't care enough to get rid of this annoyance.

Nobody wants to use \??\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume3\ in their paths.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#96

Post by pipes »

ilotoki0804 wrote: post #84

You can install gnu-compative shell commands when installing git for Windows. It even includes useful unix utilites like bash, so check it out if you're interested. More project information: https://gitforwindows.org/ Official download: https://git-scm.com/install/windows

Always wondered if git bash was cygwin, I don't think it is, but it seems very similar.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#97

Post by throwatdem12311 »

rvz wrote: post #36
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #22

Was not expecting EEE for Coreutils but I suppose it’s the natural consequence of the MIT license used for uutils so not totally unexpected. It’s annoying enough to support the differences between BSD and Linux, and now Linux has GNU and uutils, and now we’re gonna need Windows variant of uutils…ugh.

It was really obvious. Microsoft "loves" Linux for years and the entire point was to bring the Linux userspace on the Windows Desktop.

Such a blatantly obvious attempt to damage GNU

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#98

Post by LoganDark »

chasil wrote: post #87
LoganDark wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the point is so you can use scripts made for other platforms on windows natively, which you lose when you have to alter them to pass absolute paths

Busybox helps you avoid this nicely on Windows. When you run one of one of its shells, it uses all it's own builtins in preference to anything external. Get the 64-bit version: "there's some advantage in using the 64-bit executable busybox64.exe. In particular, it can be quite a bit faster." https://frippery.org/busybox/index.html

Busybox is nice, but it's kind of like the Blender default cube to me: my only memories of it are removing it on sight to replace with something better.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#99

Post by pjmlp »

chasil wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #12

> Several commands share names with built-ins in CMD and PowerShell. Whether the Coreutils version runs depends on the shell, the PATH order, and (for PowerShell) the alias table. Well this is not very satisfying, what about proving a way where it actually works without us having to guess where the failure root cause happens to be?

Fully-qualify the path to the target program, and it should be no concern.

What a great developer experience out of the box!

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#100

Post by zahllos »

chasil wrote: post #85
jakegmaths wrote: post #30

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX. In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough. WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when con…

Windows is also a rare bird in UTF-16. "UTF-16 is used by the Windows API, and by many programming environments such as Java and Qt. The variable-length character of UTF-16, combined with the fact that most characters are not variable-length (so variable length is rarely tested), has led to many bugs in software, including in Windows itself. "UTF-16 is the only encoding (still) allowed on the web that is incompatible…

Additional Detail: it is specifically utf-16 little endian when a byte order mark is not used, which is the opposite of the recommended choice of big endian in the RFC.

Worse are the byte order marks required to support both endians that end up in files.

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