Re: more or less Newbies?

[lucier@cow-net.com]

** Reply to note from Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> Tue, 24 Mar 1998 00:40:58   
+0100 
 
> The one thing that remains for me to say is that I didn't want to object 
> against less as the default pager. I just wanted to point out that more is a 
> UNIX power tool, and that it does make sense to have more but not less on a 
> system. 
 
And all I was trying to point out was that for newbies, IMHO, it makes more sense to have a utility that uses the two   
keys that are present on practically every keyboard in existence today, pgup/pgdn,  rather them having to go to   
commandline and arguments to accomplish the same thing.  At the time of my original message, noone was talking   
about power tools or power users.  I have *no* problems with more being included in any release but to my mind   
it is far, far easier for a experienced unix/linux user to change their scripts etc than it is for a newbie just starting   
out exploring a new OS.  :-) 
 
> However, it is not a bug that you can't scroll back in man pages with more. 
> The reason is, that man feeds the formatted man page with a pipe (another 
 
And as can be seen from this example, even experienced users are not always aware of the whys and   
wherefores. <shrug> 
 
> Another point I want to stress is the importance of regular expressions, a 
> concept that in the three operating systems mentioned by lucier is not even 
> known.  
 
While I must admit, I am certainly not up on all the ins and outs of regular expressions, a quick check of Deja   
News or larger OS/2 file sites will show there are plenty of utilties, editors etc that support regular expressions;   
some of them have even been ported from Unix (which unless I am mistaken a lot of linux utilities are ported from;   
please feel free to correct me on this if I am mistaken).  The Enhanced Editor (EPM) which is included with OS/2   
has the following description in its INF file: 
 
  7. GREP - this is a Search option that  
     lets you perform searches using regular  
     expressions, a powerful feature that  
     lets you search for patterns in addition  
     to specific strings.  
 
  5. extended GREP (including subexpression  
     replacement for Change command) -  
     adds alternation, grouping, and macros  
     (e.g., :o = optional whitespace) to the  
     standard GREP search.  
 
Want to roll your own.......OS/2 comes with its own scripting language REXX (Note: I do not claim to be an expert   
on REXX either but from what I have read and understand REXX can be made to do regular expression   
searches). 
 
FWIW, quite a few unix goodies have been ported to OS/2 (emacs, grep, less, bash, lesstif, tcsh, zsh,) to name   
some that I have on my BBS here but it is in no way a full listing of all the ports. 
 
Anyways, I do have a question for you (or anyone else).......when is the next stable release of Debian due?  I am   
doing some beta testing for a new Java application that the author wishes to test out in the linux enviroment but I   
find that my installed edition of Debian seems to be out of date with respect to what is needed for running the   
current Java releases.  Rather than go through a bunch of upgrading, I would rather just go with a fresh install of   
the new Debian release so it would be nice to have some kind of time frame on this matter. 
 
Any information on the above matter would be appreciated..........:-) 
 



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