Windows not so bad after all?

This post is for my distinguished hacker colleague Stefan Z. Do you remember how we were always complaining that you cannot do any serious development on Windows, as the following standard Unix command line isn't posible?

    cat out.txt | grep ERROR

Well, as I'm doing Windows programming now, I recently found out that it's possible after all! Incredible but true! Hovever the syntax is somehow different:

    type out.txt | findstr ERROR

On things like that I see how fast the time is passing! A couple of years before, I'd never believe that Windows would ever catch on. I think, the tide change came with XP.

But wait, it comes even better! Here's a script for checking if a process is running and killing it if so:

   tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq myProcess.exe" | findstr myProcess.exe
   if ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO next

   echo "-- kill running myProcess"
   taskkill /F /IM myProcess.exe

 next:
   echo "-- starting the XXX process"

Even a sleep is possible (athough it's arguably very ugly):

    @ping 127.0.0.1 -n 2 -w 1000 > nul

And here (in the IT-Dojo) you can see that the Windows command promtp has some interesting history mechanisms!