Bruce wrote:
>
> au contraire.....
> if you put in the -f, and get the source and target backwards,
POOF! there
> goes your file.....
>

jpcarr=BXdtB8kxIH5Wk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org wrote:
Hans

I still say they are cryptic :-)

ROTF, LMAO

jOHN

;-)

Okay, smarty, then what's the OS/400 equivalent of the ln command?

;-)

I may be wrong, but I don't think I ever argued that Posix commands
were not cryptic. On the other hand, I disagree with the proposition
that OS/400 programmers are incapable of learning those "cryptic"
commands.

I remember way back in the summer of 1981 when CPF had a total of
about 250 commands. How many commands are there now in OS/400?
"DSPOBJD OBJ(QSYS/*ALL) OBJTYPE(*CMD)" gives me about 1840. I'm sure
there must be an easier way to do this in OS/400, but to determine
that number, I outputed the DSPOBJD results to a print file,
manually counted the number of entries per page, and multiplied by
the number of pages. I'm not really sure what the number is in a
typical Linux distro, but in a Posix command shell, I could get the
number directly using "ls /usr/bin |wc -l". Cryptic? Sure. But I can
get the answer I want with a lot less muss and fuss. (Oh yeah, I'm
sure most decent distros provide a few more than the 125 commands
provided by qshell.)

As I and others have pointed out, there is just a different
philosophy behind these two operating systems. Unix provides a
fairly low-level file system model with very few distinct "object"
types: Directories, links, files, devices. It's up to specific
applications to assign further semantic meaning to these basic file
system entries. Unix also provides the flexibility to combine
different commands together, as shown above.

OS/400, on the other hand, provides a more high-level view of file
system "objects", with definite distinct types for programs,
commands, data areas, database files, source files, printer file,
output queues, etc. etc. Along with that, you also get a
proliferation of object type specific commands. Plus, since command
inputs and outputs can't be piped together, there is a proliferation
of command options to increase the functionality of the commands.

Low-level OS abstraction versus high-level OS abstraction. I'm not
going to argue which one is better than the other since they're just
plain different. It's like arguing which is better: peanut butter
sandwiches or Nikon cameras. On the other hand, I really do enjoy
playing devil's advocate, and this present discussion has been a lot
of fun.  ;-)

Oh yeah, lest anyone misunderstand:  Sure, I'm a Unix/Linux fan, but
I'm also an OS/400 fan.

Cheers!  Hans





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