by I'm one of those people who "swears by the MKS Toolkit" -- at least I do
whenever I have to use something goofy like MessyDos, Windoze, or Os/2.
(OS/2 is somewhat more than half an OS, never mind the name.) MKS
includes most all of the utilities you would use as a (command line)
unix user, so you can write scripts that use sed and tr and diff. And
vi, and awk, and m4....
This is the ONLY commercial software package (except Cakewalk) I have
NEVER regretted purchasing. My only gripes are some tiny discrepancies
between versions. But if MKS were self consistent, it wouldn't be Unix,
would it? :-)
But one other thing to consider is Perl. There are ports of it (at least
of v 4.036) to both OS/2 (good) and dos (well... not AS good.) Perl is
IMHO much easier to script in because the regex stuff is more uniform and
powerful. Also, Perl will (except for system calls) act more consistently
between versions and platforms. (Would the REAL Kornshell please stand up?)
One other thing on the Dos/Os2 front, regarding ports of FSF (GNU) tools
and such: the EMX library. Helps your code think it is running in Unix.
Eases porting. You may need it to run a lot of the (truly WONDERFUL, I must
add) ported free software. In OS/2 it is a dll (or bunch of 'em) so you
need to have a version current enough for whatever you run.
Sorry to not follow the thread--- the articles I should be replying to
zipped out into read-article land and (because I am using a newsreader
instead of NNTP via a perl script :-) I cannot figure out how to retrieve
'em.
But DO check out MKS as well as public domain stuff. If you only need one
copy, consider MKS just to get the documentation. It is quite good.
(Anyone remember the Mark Williams Co. Coherent (unix) documentation?
also excellent. Too bad they drowned in the Linux tide. (BTW I use and
very much like Linux. Much of its documentation is also quite good.)
Dave Kenny