DOS to UNIX Conversion

[Stephen L Arnold]

On 17 May 99, Axel Neumann <amn at cromemco.com> had questions about 
DOS to UNIX Conversion:  

> It seems that a lot of people hate Windoze in such a way that they only 
> accept solutions that are not coming from M$.

Maybe that's because the M$ "solutions" are crap, and much better 
alternatives already exist.

> If you want to view UNIX text files correctly on a W9x or NT client you 
> should use Wordpad or if you have you can also use Word. These two
> programs display the files correctly and you can save them correctly
> (maybe there is some problem with the extension).

WordPad is only slightly less useless than NotePad (and *much* more 
annoying).  Believe me, my kid's have been trying to write their 
first few reports with it, and nobody should be forced to use that 
thing.  I'm gonna give them WordPerfect and start using StarOffice 
myself (but not for text files).

And why on earth would you want to use Word for working with text 
files?  Not to mention the bloat (and other problems), there are 
tools specifically designed for that (with much more appropriate 
features).  Everything from small and simple (PFE) to medium with 
more features (gvim), included color-coded syntax highlighting, to 
something that does more than I'll ever need, like emacs, or if you 
must spend money, SlickEdit.

> Why buying or downloading additional software if it is not really 
> necessary.

Getting the right tool for the job (whether downloading for free or 
buying something) is a much better way to attack the problem.

Ranting Steve


************************************************
Steve Arnold  CLE (Certifiable Linux Evangelist)
http://www.rain.org/~sarnold