[GRASS-dev] Re: missing awk in WinGRASS

Glynn Clements glynn at gclements.plus.com
Wed Jan 23 20:28:44 EST 2008


Michael Barton wrote:

> >> Is msys needed for any other aspects of GRASS -- i.e., is it  
> >> required to run it? Or is it only needed if you want to do the  
> >> scripts?
> >
> > Only for the scripts. And even for those it doesn't have to be msys.  
> > You could install the individual components (a shell like bash, awk,  
> > sed, etc) separately, e.g. from GnuWin32. As long as these tools are  
> > in your path, this should work.
> 
> Is GnuWin32 a better option than msys for this?

MSys has the advantage that all of the WinGRASS testing has been done
with it.

Ultimately, using any Unix shell on Windows is an exercise in
frustration. Windows ports invariably introduce some level of Unix
emulation (otherwise existing scripts wouldn't work), which in turn
creates problems when running native Windows executables from the
script.

The longer-term solution is to abandon Bourne shell in favour of a
popular cross-platform interpreted language (i.e. Python). Apart from
making it easier to write portable scripts, it would eliminate the
need to use external utilities (sed, awk, bc, etc) for simple tasks
(e.g. having to invoke awk or bc to perform floating-point
arithmetic).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>


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