Macs rule over all

meghatronic · 7 Dec 2006 at 11:56

I have a 1.3 million line text file sat here and merely had to remove all the commas (only one per line).

An easy job! I hear you cry.

Well for windows, no. Simply no. I have a semi-top of the range pc ([email protected]/2Gb ram) and it can't do it. I tried it in notepad, wordpad, textpad, notepad++, dos edit.. nope... Either takes AGES ( >30mins and I quit it out of anger) or crashes.

I fire up the old ibook G4 I borrowed off somebody. It did it in text edit in <30 seconds. Literally.

So, an older and inferior mac defeated my desktop.....

Who's to blame? The pc or the software?

ChrisB · 7 Dec 2006 at 12:10

grep is your friend

edit oops gawk even

porkrind · 7 Dec 2006 at 12:27

how u do that then , in case I ever have too

M0KUJ1N · 7 Dec 2006 at 12:35

You could do the above text manipulation easily in VBscript, batch files, Perl, hell even C if you're a masochist on the PC. Although yes, a proper UNIX box is far nicer for text/stream manipulation than a Windows one

meghatronic · 7 Dec 2006 at 12:43

M0KUJ1N said:
You could do the above text manipulation easily in VBscript, batch files, Perl, hell even C if you're a masochist on the PC. Although yes, a proper UNIX box is far nicer for text/stream manipulation than a Windows one

Indeed. I had coded php to do it and have a perl script to do it but I needed to do it quickly so tried notepad etc....

The mac's native text program could do it, so why couldn't windows! heh

DAVEM · 7 Dec 2006 at 16:56

MySYS will do that for you in no time.

David

james.miller · 7 Dec 2006 at 16:58

thats...weird.

Moredhel · 7 Dec 2006 at 17:21

Something very wrong there, textpad did it for me in seconds. Far quicker than doing it on my 1ghz G4 did.

In fact, the longest part of the whole process was generating the 1.3 million line file.

skiba · 10 Dec 2006 at 23:30

as above, awk would do this in a few characters...this is the kinda thing that makes me love gnu tools and like windows less and less each day.