Re: [h-e-w] pb with the use of Merge

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 16:16:22 -0400
> From: Nat Goodspeed <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
>    It's true that new versions of cmd are much more powerful than 
> ever before. They've tried to adopt many semantic features of the 
> Bourne shell and its many descendants. The trouble is that rather 
> than borrowing syntax as well, they've invented some truly astonishing 
> kludges.

I think they only look kludges because we are accustomed to the Bourne
shell syntax.  Someone who is used to cmd will probably find the
Bourne shell semantics arcane and unintuitive.

>    I have a small bash script, a helper used by other scripts, that 
> searches for the base of my current Subversion work area. It writes 
> the pathname to standard output. Typical usage in a bash script:
> cd "$(find-workarea)"
>    I recently had to write a .bat script (don't ask) in which I 
> wanted to use the same helper. Yes, it certainly is *possible*. 
> Here's what I had to write:
> for /f "usebackq" %%w in (`bash find-workarea`) do cd %%w

I don't know what find-workarea does, but there probably are ways to
use the more advanced features of `for /f' for this job without
resorting to backticks, if you just dump the Bash script and do it
straight in cmd.  The primary intent of `for /f' is to parse files,
so if find-workarea does anything like that, you shouldn't need to
resort to Bash.

The upshot of this is that, while cmd is not as powerful as Bash, its
latest versions go a long way towards that goal.  And the new
PowerShell is even more powerful.