[comp.sys.ibm.pc] unix like utilities for dos

dgw@mimsy.UUCP (Daniel Winkowski) (02/02/88)

I am looking for preferably commercial packages that support many of the common
unix(tm) utilities in DOS. A new shell (ksh, csh or sh) would also be terrific.

One such example package is the MKS toolkit from Mortice Kern Systems. Does
anyone have experience with this package? better ones? 


Daniel G. Winkowski	(301) 688-5288
ARPA & CSNet:  dgw@mimsy.umd.edu  OR Winkowski@DOCKMASTER.ARPA
UUCP:  uunet!mimsy!dgw

rdo031@tijc02.UUCP (Rick Odle ) (02/02/88)

in article <10422@mimsy.UUCP>, dgw@mimsy.UUCP (Daniel Winkowski) says:
> 
> I am looking for preferably commercial packages that support many of the common
> unix(tm) utilities in DOS. A new shell (ksh, csh or sh) would also be terrific.
> 
> One such example package is the MKS toolkit from Mortice Kern Systems. Does
> anyone have experience with this package? better ones? 
> 
> 
> Daniel G. Winkowski	(301) 688-5288
> ARPA & CSNet:  dgw@mimsy.umd.edu  OR Winkowski@DOCKMASTER.ARPA
> UUCP:  uunet!mimsy!dgw

MKS is great. We use  the many of the routines every day.  The ksh that
is included is excellent.  We built some fairly sophisticated scripts to
automatically create makefiles given a list of directories in a file that
worked fine.  The other really great tool in the kit is their implementation
of vi, the most thorough and compatable look-alike that I've seen.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rick Odle	(615) 461-2371
Texas Instruments Industrial Systems Division
Johnson City, TN 
UUCP:		mcnc!rti!tijc02!rdo031
faster uucp:	mcnc!convex!smu!ti-csl!tijc02!rdo031

jcb@loral.UUCP (Jay C. Bowden) (02/04/88)

Ditto to everything good said about MKS toolkit.
When I go home at night, and I can still grep, sed,
awk, and vi JUST LIKE THE VAX/BSD 4.3 here at work,
I realize it was the best $140 I've ever spent on PC
software.  Excuse the gushing, but the vi is just
unbelievably good.  At one time I thought, naw, no one
could ever do vi right on a PC.  Silly me!

- Jay Bowden

romero@mind.UUCP (Antonio Romero) (02/05/88)

In article <194@tijc02.UUCP>, rdo031@tijc02.UUCP (Rick Odle           ) writes:
> in article <10422@mimsy.UUCP>, dgw@mimsy.UUCP (Daniel Winkowski) says:
> > One such example package is the MKS toolkit from Mortice Kern Systems. Does
> > anyone have experience with this package? better ones? 
> > Daniel G. Winkowski	(301) 688-5288
> 
> MKS is great. We use  the many of the routines every day.  The ksh that
> is included is excellent.  
> The other really great tool in the kit is their implementation
> of vi, the most thorough and compatable look-alike that I've seen.

A few comments here:

	1) I'd like to praise most highly their implementation of awk.  NICE.
	Saved me god knows how much time already...

	2) The shell is most welcome, but getting it to work on Novell
	is kind of a neat trick.  In fact, a number of the utilities
	behave really oddly on Novell networks-- ctags, pack, ls, some others.
	I haven't tested exhaustively, though.  If anyone out there has had
	trouble w/ Novell and their stuff, let them know-- they seem eager to 
	help out if they can.

	3) Their VI seems to crash from time to time at the bottom of a file.
	Also, it includes a very unusual feature which looks a lot like
	Berkeley ^Z job control for suspending vi jobs.  This is normally
	wonderful but on occasion when you restart a job the buffer has been
	garbaged and VI warns you to save the buffer somewhere, exit the
	program immediately, panic, run away, etc.

On the whole, though, just about everything works really well-- most 
trouble I've had has been somehow related to running on Novell networks.
I've also dealt with their technical support people both by e-mail and
by phone, and found the company very pleasant, knowledgable, etc...  

Now if only their implementation of RCS is as good as the rest of their
stuff...

Antonio Romero       romero@mind.princeton.edu