Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS
The gHacks blog has a post about the 5 Things Linux does better than Windows. Reading it got me thinking about a situation I had recently. I had close to 40 thousand text files, and I needed a list of all unique files. I wouldn’t even know how to attach that problem in Windows. With Linux, it only took a few minutes: Using “find” to identify the files, “md5sum” to generate a hash for each file, “sort” to sort them, “uniq” to remove files with identical hash values, and “cut” to remove the remaining hash values. Putting it all together:
$ find . | xargs md5sum | sort | uniq -w 32 | cut -b 35-
Of course, there are other situations where Windows is better. It is, for example, the de facto standard in today’s business world where everyone has a laptop running Windows. Picking a non-Windows laptop for business would be just asking for trouble.
The gHacks post says it well:
[...] the truth of the matter is, there are certain aspects of the Linux operating system that are just plain better than Windows. And, of course, there are certain aspects of the Windows operating system that are better than Linux. And…of course…there are certain aspects of OS X that are better than either Windows or Linux. It’s a three way street here.