Mail Archives: cygwin/2009/07/15/12:04:25
Chap Harrison wrote:
>
> defaria wrote:
>> Why are you trying to deal with a very manual, step by step, point and
>> click method of thinking and doing? The basic task here is to get data
>> from an Excel worksheet (which is not a good input method to start with)
>> to a text file. There are programmatic ways to do this. You can, for
>> example, extract data from an Excel spreadsheet using Perl.
>>
>
> This is not *my* preferred way of doing things; it's the way my colleagues
> are used to doing things. To put it mildly, they don't work smart. I'm
> trying to gently introduce them to the amazing world of automation while not
> upsetting them completely :-D . Eventually, when they realize that Mr.
> Computer can save them hours and days of mind-numbing drudgery and carpal
> tunnel syndrome, the scales may fall from Mr. Boss-man's eyes and he'll ask
> me to build something that'll be *really* easy to use.
Failing that, you at least have a rich seam of material to mine for stories
to submit to http://thedailywtf.com/ :-/
> defaria wrote:
>> This part didn't parse for me. Wouldn't running Cygwin on the machine
>> you are doing the cutting and pasting be it's own Windows environment?!?
>
> Well, not nearly so much as having it run in a separate machine. I don't
> know exactly how deeply it ties itself into the Windows OS (I know virtually
> nothing about Windows), but I *do* know that if anything happened on the
> Windows machine (that's shared by several users), suspicion would
> immediately fall on Cygwin.
For the record, Cygwin does not "tie itself into the OS" deeply or even at
all, not in the slightest. It is an entirely ordinary windows program running
in user mode. It has the ability to install services (which are also just
ordinary user-mode executables), and there is in one case - libusb - a
kernel-mode device driver; you'd want to not install that. But that one
exception aside, everything cygwin is and does is just a win32 program and a
bunch of win32 DLLs. It cannot BSoD the machine, crash non-cygwin processes,
or corrupt the kernel, it does not do low-level disk i/o, it no more hooks
itself into the OS than notepad or solitaire.
> My boss worked for IBM for ten years, in Marketing. Fear, uncertainty, and
> doubt run deep for him. I'd like to run Cygwin directly on the "production"
> machine (it has been superbly reliable for me) but superstition is tough to
> battle directly.
Oh dear, doesn't sound like mere facts alone will be much use to you!
cheers,
DaveK
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