Re: Great SWT Program
On Nov 18, 6:55 pm, twerpina...@gmail.com wrote:
So much for launching 80 files simultaneously if they're in a deeply
nested directory structure. Those could easily exceed the 110 or so
characters per path name that would suffice for a list of all 80 to be
more than 8K long.
Intruigingly, cmd.exe is the only shell in common use with an onerous
command-line length limit. Even Microsoft's replacement shell has a
much more sensible limit (the one imposed by CreateProcess/Ex,
mainly). Perhaps the time has come to retire cmd... Oh well, that's
another thread. Response files are a well-understood tool for working
with cmd.exe and batch files, and are no more a hack than IO
redirection is on unix, or AppleScript reflection is on a Mac. The
only reason you haven't encountered them before is that you don't use
the command line for much.
(I've had occasion to mass-select 80-odd text files and double click
one of them, producing 80 shiny new Notepad windows, and check for a
particular thing in each one before closing it.
$ grep -v 'some particular thing' *.txt
If the "some particular thing" isn't as simple as a specific string
appearing in each file, this won't be applicable. Certainly if nuanced
human interpretation of written English is required, automating it is
AI-complete.
Also, grep will output a list of filenames, which you then have to
type one by one as the arguments to some other commands to do your
next action with the files in question.
This is probably non-obvious to shell non-users, but no matter, here
are two ways to get there from here:
1. $EDITOR `grep -L 'some particular' *.txt`
(note that $ in this case is part of the command, not a placeholder
for the prompt. You can replace $EDITOR with the name of a specific
editor if you like; on one of my machines, it's 'mate -w'; on another,
it's 'emacs'; you could use 'vi' or even 'gedit' there just fine,
too.)
2. Get a file browser or an editor that incorporates a shell. I've
heard good things about PathFinder; there may be one or two for
Windows, too. My own editor of choice has some fairly clever shell
integration of its own, in both directions.
There is always more than one good way to skin a cat. :)
Especially with a GUI with its richness of interaction methods. As
noted I can use Explorer's search, or just mass-open and manually
inspect the files, particularly if what I'm looking for can't be
described as a simple search query for a computer to apply.
The nice part, for me, about approach one is that, on the machine I'm
typing this on, I get a single editor window with a drawer containing
all of the files selected that I can navigate through freely or add to
and remove from. Opening eighty separate windows seems like a
ridiculous amount of visual clutter to me, but then, different strokes
and all that.
Under emacs I'd still get a single window, with the last several
(ten?) files in the 'Window' menu (along with a "more..."-like menu
item providing access to the other 70) and all of them available using
the usual pane-switching keystrokes and menu items. I'm sure vi has
something similar.
And I know from experience that this works on Windows, too: dragging a
random selection of files to the emacs icon and letting go results in
a single emacs window with the same properties I just described.
Likewise TextPad and JEdit and all the other multi-document text
editors.