scowles@earthlink.net wrote:

> TB> Though Cygwin seems to have left MKS in the dust for most
> TB> of the functions I am interested in -- vim vs. vi, mutt
> TB> vs. mailx, fetchmail vs. something-that-didn't-work-for-me,
> TB> procmail vs. nothing -- there are a few commands that I still
> TB> use in their MKS versions:
> 
> TB>     cpio      - is this out of fashion now, or what?
> 
> yes, it is.  the big difference between cpio and tar in ages past was
> that cpio could handle devices.  (arguably, complete lists in
> configuration management are handled much easier by cpio's stdin
> filename input method).  however, gnutar now handles devices just as well.
> in addition, gnutar handles major compression techniques internally.
> source for gnu cpio (i have used ver. 2.4.2 for years) is readily
> available and compiles ootb on cygwin.  it handles all of my ancient
> archives from multiple platforms.


Yeah, but cpio is still valuable for mucking with rpm's.  I often do 
this, when I want to extract code without installing the rpm...

rpm2cpio foo.rpm | cpio -i --make-directories

Granted, we don't have rpm yet, so...


> TB>     flip      - changes CRLF endings; no equivalent in Cygwin?
> 
> easy to do in any shell:  invoke /bin/tr to do the translation
> you need.  e.g.  for cr to lf:  cat $file | /bin/tr '\015' '\


d2u and u2d are already in the cygutils package.


> TB>     more      - sometimes I do not want the text to disappear from
> TB>                 the screen on exit
> 
> /bin/more is part of cygwin on my system (current as of 2 hours ago,
> full install).


Yep.  But don't use it -- less is much better.

> 
> TB>     rev       - reverse order of characters in a line
> 


This is on my TODO list for cygutils.  On linux, it is part of the 
util-linux package, a grab bag of random small utilities.  On cygwin, 
cygutils is the grab bag of random small utilities: hence...

I've attached the util-linux source for rev.c -- it's a bit more complex 
(complete?) than some of the other implementations...I'll probably use 
it as the basis for cygutils' version.

--Chuck