I am hoping there are some Windows command-line wizards here. If there are, I am forever in your debt.
I have used R (and related tools) on Linux for years. I do everything in emacs if I can. My fingers are just happier that way.
To ensure my analysis is reproducible, I write a makefile for each report / analysis in a project. I use a combination of R and pandoc to produce reports these days. Once my makefile is written, I simply open a shell and enter:
make -f my_target
And my computer runs my analysis. Easy. On Linux.
I have recently started a job with the government and my computer is running Windows and I no longer have make, except through mingw and neither emacs nor gitbash recognize make. I would like to be able to run make (or something equivalent) from both (or either) emacs / gitbash to run my code in a coherent / sane manner.
Thus my question is this. How can I use make, which is currently ONLY accessible through a msys shell and not connected to either gitbash or emacs or what other tool should I move to so I can continue to "build" my reports in a sane / reproducible manner?
If I am better off learning a new tool, that is fine. If there is some way to run mingw's make from emacs / gitbash that is good too. I am open to suggestions. Most of the tutorials on-line are for Windows programmers moving to Linux. There aren't as many resources for us moving from Linux to Windows (which is understandable).
After much swearing and gnashing of teeth, I finally figured out what I did wrong.
I followed the installation instructions for MinGW, but I made a typo when I altered my user's path. Thus, MinGW was NOT in my path.
Following these instructions work, but it isn't smart enough to fix your typographical errors.
Getting Started
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Here is my situation, when I download Gentoo and start to run it and downloaded the stage III Tarball from links and then tried to extract it a stream of white sentences flows down my screen really fast for about a minute just like in the YouTube tutorial I was viewing. However, after that instead of going to the correct stage it says cannot right not enough space on device and I tried repartitioning it but I'm not sure what device it is talkingaboutHowever, after that instead of going to the correct stage it says cannot right not enough space on device and I tried repartitioning it but I'm not sure what device it is talking about. Please help
Sorry you're having this issue, though in general, I truly believe Gentoo Handbook is quite well written and even a newbie can follow it... Here are some advices that I hope I can give you (most important is, digest the handbook and follow it carefully, not that I'm saying "RTFM", it's just that for Gentoo, handbook is essential and without it, we can get lost if you're just starting).
From my experiences, the "stream of white sentences" I'd presume would be from verbose un-tar'ing your stage3. Usually, I only want to see the errors so my suggestions is to remove the "v" (i.e. from "tar xjvpf" to "tar xjpf") so that only errors would appear when un-tar'ing. The caveat to this is that you'll be wondering if it hung or is busy un-tar'ing. Use Alt-F1 and Alt-F2 (if on console/tty mode back-and-forth) to log in on another TTY and do 'ps -auxf' to see if it's still tar'ing. If you're using GUI Terminal, just open another tab and 'ps auxf', you get the picture...
Also, learn the commands "df", it'll come in handy. If you're running out of disk space, perhaps you're trying to install/untar stage3 to your ramdisk (grin) rather than your mounted (i.e. "/mnt/gentoo"). Mount your root '/' device to '/mnt/gentoo' and cd to that mounted path then try it (don't forget to mount your '/boot' as well as your proc, dev, sys, etc before you chroot - again, follow the handbook as carefully as you can - oh also, distro such as Debian hybrids including Ubuntu uses symlink to shm, so read that part about 'rm /dev/shm' and follow it carefully; if you're using Gentoo LiveCD, you can ignore that part).
Other useful commands if you're confused (or new to) mounting devices would be to learn to experiment with commands such as 'lsblk' and 'mount' (by itself) to inspect the sizes of your partition (again, use of 'df' comes in handy as well) as well as what is your device (i.e. /dev/sda1 versus /dev/sdb1). Hint: when you do 'mkfs', use "-L" (or for some file system, it's "-N") to label/name your devices, so that when you use commands such as 'mount' or 'lsblk', you can spot them easier. If you're using GUI/desktop versions of some distro, hopefully there are tools such as "gparted" which can give you visual information in GUI of your devices which can be helpful. One think I'd advise you to stay away from if you're just starting, is to avoid RAID (i.e. mdadm) until you're comfortable with how grub/lilo works. Get your kernel (Gentoo-sources) compiled and MBR written (i.e. grub-install), try booting and have fun first (oh also, if you can avoid GUI like installing Gnome/KDE from the get-go, avoid it as well - you'll get into issues such as "should I use SystemD or OpenRC" and then get hit by the obstacle of some gnome parts needs you to use systemd but you've chosen openrc, and so on).
If I may add my opinions, in my opinion, Gentoo (also Arch and FreeBSD) is an excellent place to start if you want to learn the inside of Linux application workings (library dependencies, why packages are important rather than downloading each libs manually and compile them one by one, etc). I hope this won't discourage you from switching to another distro, but if it does frustrate you on installation and all you want to do is test-drive Linux, there are much easier distro that you'd not have to understand USE and other compilation mechanisms (if you have an old i586, it makes sense to build it with pick-and-chose libraries so that leaner can be faster, but if you have fast machine, why compile binaries when somebody who is expert at it already have done it for you?). SUSE and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS used to be the least frustrating for it was able to find/detect hardwares (legacy and new) but these days, I usually tell people, "if you know how to install Windows, you can install Ubuntu" so that too may be a good way to wet your feet. Good luck!
0_o wow, well.. how about some 411 like size of your hdd and exactly how you partioned it? Linux will look for specific directorys and if missing will instead start to install into the root dir. How you partion is an importent first step. Once you got a generally good partion setup most linux installs will go fine. Most basic tables include /, /home,/var and a swap.
I'm the uninformed user. I want to use mercurial for my personal use in terms of writing code and writing papers and have every change be accessible. I'm not a programmer by trade, I run a lot of matlab code and that's it as far as programming experience goes. I've installed the TortoiseHg with Windows Explorer "shell" integration all-in-one package. I already have python 2.7 installed too.
Next I went to this tutorial: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/TutorialInstall and I got lost right away. They say the mercurial program is called hg, so I type so in the search function and it comes up, I open it and a quick command window opens up and closes in a fraction of a second and that's it, nothing else happens. I read a bit further into the tutorial and they say that you have to type hg in the prompt. I tried windows powershell and this did work but I don't know if I was supposed to be doing this from within some hg prompt or something.
I went to the next step of the tutorial and they go through the steps of making a repository. I blindly typed the commands they have setup and it worked until I typed "ls -a" saying that it's not a recognized cmdlet.
I don't know what I'm doing and I need a better resource that helps me get this set up and running as I don't understand why even opening "hg" does apparently nothing or if even I should be using powershell for the tutorial.
Mercurial is mainly used by people who are programmers by trade...so all the tutorials are written for programmers, and therefore assume a certain understanding of how command line applications work.
I suspect you're not that familiar with the command line, so first of all, I second user694733's comment:
For a beginner, the TortoiseHG GUI is way easier to get started.
(and they have excellent documentation as well)
Anyway, here's why the command line didn't work like you expected:
hg is a command line application. When you directly start it from Windows (which you did by typing hg in the Windows start menu), it behaves like you described: it pops up and immediately disappears. You need it to start from the Windows command line instead.
There are two different command lines in Windows:
a) Windows PowerShell, which you already used
b) the "classic" Windows command line, which you can open by typing cmd into the search box in the Windows start menu
There's no special "hg prompt", it's just that you're supposed to run hg in one of the two command line interfaces I listed above. It doesn't matter which one you use - hg behaves the same in both.
it worked until I typed "ls -a" saying that it's not a recognized cmdlet.
Mercurial does not only work on Windows, but on other operating systems as well (Linux and Mac OS, for example).
The hg commands are the same everywhere, but everything else is different depending on your operating system. For example, ls is the Linux command to list the content of a directory. In Windows, it's dir instead.
Most, if not all, of the Mercurial developers don't use Windows, so their tutorials are not written with Windows in mind.
You should really start with TortoiseHG, as mentioned above (its documentation is Windows friendly, too) or if you really want to use the command line, I'd suggest a different tutorial, Hg Init, which was written by a Windows guy (Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Stack Exchange, the company that runs Stack Overflow).
my goal: to create a suite of scripts that do some common system tasks, which include these
copy/move/list/search/grep files
watch/start/stop processes
run queries against Oracle via sqlplus
i grew accustomed to using Cygwin/bash to ease my life at work, and frankly speaking, i don't want to move away from bash language and start learning PowerShell, for example - so i started searching for a way to run bash scripts on Windows, ... preferably something alternative to Cygwin.
the truth is that i am still not pleased with Cygwin installation, and the fact that there is no simple way around it, that it is targeting more or less expert users, and there are a number of things that might pop up during the installation. i mean. what i am trying to do now is to write a suite of scripts that will target someone less expert than me (and i am in no way a real expert) - in most cases some kind of an administrator who doesn't want to know the script details.
i am thinking that this user will also want to be able to run these scripts on another machine, and i want to be able to explain him/her how to do it, without just saying, call the support, and, me, eventually (so that we can install cygwin on another machine etc etc.)
i tried MinGW(msys) but it also needs manual steps to set things up - i mean, these manual steps have become something of a de facto standard in these Windows ports (sorry, maybe i have a mood for bragging). win-bash looked like it could be a solution, but i ended up trashing it too, because of the old bash version, and its inability to do things i was able to do in cygwin - specifically
here documents
things like "cmd /C dir *" (don't know why) - and yes, i do cmd /C dir in cases i am in some kind of shared network folder with thousands of files, and ls is significantly slower than dir
my questions at last:
am i doomed to use PowerShell? i guess i will, reluctantly, if i have to
is there a simple pre-packaged "slim" cygwin installation.. or, portable cygwin, even better? there is a cygwin-portable project on sourceforge, but it's not that doesn't need those manual steps, again, apparently - is there a way to automate those steps, perhaps? and if there is, i wonder why somebody hasn't done it already? - and then, would it be possible to call bash scripts from Windows command prompt using a simple command like "bash somescript.sh"?
thanks for your attention.
As mentioned here, the Cygwin installation can totally be scripted and parametrized to ran in a silently and automatic mode.
If you define the minimal list of cygwin packages you need, just use a little .bat script that call the cygmin setup executable like this
setup.exe --packages=list_of_packages_you_need --quiet-mode
If you wrap the cygwin install process, it should be tolerable for a less technical user.
The cygwin install can be streamlined using command-line args;
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2003-03/msg00526.html
You can also automate the install of most cygwin packages through cyg-apt.
I haven't verified this but I suspect that msys implements a *nix look alike by creating windows executable versions of system commands. All of the common commands have an executable on my install of msys. If that is true then it should be possible to use them separate from a complete install.
Try copying "bash.exe", "cp.exe", etc. from the msys bin directory to a machine/vm that does not have an msys install and see if it works. You may need to copy some dll's or shared libraries as well. A windows dependency checker program would show which dll's an executable is using.
You could package up the stuff you use and make a simple installer or just copy the files with your scripts.
Take a look at MKS Toolkit. Unlike Cygwin, it can live within the Windows world. Files end in CR/LF like Windows files, and you don't have that /cygdrive/c stuff. Naked drive letters work fine in MKS Toolkit.
A few caveats:
I haven't used MKS Toolkit in a long time. See following reason.
MKS Toolkit is (sit down for this) $600 per license. Ouch! That's why I use Cygwin even though I don't think it's as good or works as well.
It's Kornshell based and not Bash (although this may be a bit different). Kornshell and BASH are 95% alike. However, that last 5% gets you. I actually like Kornshell better than BASH in many respects. Kornshell has the print statement which is way superior than the echo statement. Variable names don't disappear in blocks. You can easily do double loops because almost all the commands can take unit numbers of input and output. However, Kornshell doesn't have those neat escape characters in the prompt, and it's hard to find the exit status of a command in the middle of the pipeline.
I'm trying to get Wanderlust working in Windows to connect to Gmail. Compiling the code is much more painful than expected. Here are the barriers so far:
Can't download dependent packages: SEMI, APEL, and FLIM. I eventually found newer versions, but I'm not sure they will work. Anyone have the older versions?
Needs make and install. I used MSYS and it seems to have compiled okay.
SSL support. I was getting a "Cannot open load file: ssl" error. I found an ssl.el that comes with w3. So installed w3.
Bash command in ssl.el: ssl-get-command is running something from /bin/sh (not a directory I have in Windows). I really don't want to refactor this code. Is there a better way?
Others speak very highly of Wanderlust, so I want to give it a try. I feel like I'm almost there, but am pretty much worn out with all the crazy configuration I have to do. Does anyone have this working on Windows? I'm pretty sure it will work with Gmail, because of this post. But will it work in Windows too? If you have a few pointers, please help.
ssl.el is part of wanderlust. Just look in the wanderlust/utils directory.
For STARTTLS you may either use the starttls or gnutls-cli programs.
Unfortunately, both of these programs use signals (SIGALRM to be precise) which are not supported on Windows.
You need to use the Cygwin ports of these programs -- not MSYS!
Additionally, if you're using a Windows port of Emacs (ie. not Cygwin's emacs) you need to modify starttls.el (which is part of GNU Emacs) because the signal-process function doesn't do anything regarding SIGALRM. Replace all instances of
(signal-process (process-id process) 'SIGALRM)
with
(call-process kill-program nil nil nil
"-ALRM" (format "%d" (process-id process)))
and initialize kill-program somewhere apropriately to point to cygwin's kill.exe:
(setq kill-program "c:/cygwin/bin/kill.exe")
If you want to use SSL you have to set ssl-certificate-verification-policy to a value greater than 0. Otherwise connecting to Gmail would fail.
Using the wl configuration here:
http://box.matto.nl/emacsgmail.html
After adding ssl.el from here:
http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gnus/contrib/ssl.el
I am able to get wanderlust talking just fine to gmail on a linux configuration of wanderlust, and since the ssl.el file there isn't really system-dependent (although it does require the openssl command-line tools), I don't see that there should be any problem with it working on msys.
The 'cannot open load file: ssl' error is exactly what I ran into until I installed that ssl.el file too :)
Edit; Just in case you have trouble finding it, the MSYS port of openssl you'll want is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS%20openssl/
[posted as a new answer since I think you'll get a notification that way :)]
I recently installed wl on a linux host, and had the same issue with not being able to locate the dependencies as specified. However, I, like you, found the 'more recent versions' and used them. They did indeed work fine, so unless those new versions have added any incompatibility with windows, they shouldn't present any problem.
The error you're receiving is because it's not finding the 'install' utility, which is part of GNU coreutils. Autotools (and it's family) depend on install being able to work, so if you want to continue with the cygwin method, then installing autotools should bring in the install program.
(I have no idea if wl will compile/work using cygwin otherwise, though.)
If you do not know what Pipe Viewer is (I did not know about it until 5 minutes ago), then this blog does a good job giving a brief introduction to it with some examples. I write a lot of Perl Scripts as an ETL developer and a lot of times, the files that I work with take really long time to operate with (unzipping, moving, etc). Therefore, this tool would be awesome except I work in a Windows Environment. If anyone knows of a tool that gives you Progress of an operation running in the pipeline, please let me know as that would make my scripts that much more useful.
I finally made it work on Cygwin environment though that is not answer for the original post.
--disable-nls does the trick.
./configure --disable-nls
make
make test
cp pv /usr/bin
== by Kenji (k2) ==
Cygwin has pv (Pipe Viewer) as an available package since I don't know when... but it is not installed by default.
Download the Cygwin setup executablefrom the install page.
While installing cygwin, you need to expressly search and mark for installation pv found in the Utils section.
If you have already installed cygwin, you can always add it later on by re-running the setup executable.
I doubt such a tool exists for win32, but it should run on cygwin. But then again You probably don't use it :)
I suspect you want to use pipe viewer to catch the output performance (bytes/s) of a console application.
If you want to measure the performance IO read/write of a process, I recommend using Process Explorer. You can find performance for each process.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer