I keep cygwin (Unix CLI tools for Windows) on my desktop for just these 
reasons. I don't think there are DOS equivalents for a lot of the 
powerful Unix functions like find and touch.

http://www.cygwin.com/

Alden Hart

James Newtons Massmind wrote:
>> There are fundamental differences between GUI and CLI types 
>> of interfaces. There are of course good and bad examples of 
>> both, but that's another story.
>>     
>
> On an old mini computer system years ago, I sat down at a console and, not
> knowing what I was going, type "help" and pressed enter. The one word
> response ("RTFM") had the desired effect.
>
>   
>> The main difference for me as user is that a GUI is often 
>> easier to start with, and more cumbersome lateron, a CLI is 
>> often the opposite.
>> And a big problem for me is that most GUIs are not scriptable.
>>     
>
> But I have done a quite a bit of scripting in MS Windows using vbscript,
> sendkeys, sidekick, etc... With various degrees of success. Some authors of
> applications in windows don't think keyboards are for anything other than
> entering text.
>
> And CLI scripting in Windows systems is very much alive and well, so
> wouldn't it be nice to have a GUI of the command line utilities? E.g. the
> standard Win32 command line stuff like SORT, DIR, etc... Should have GUI
> interfaces accessible from the command line as menu pull downs or popups.
>
> There is another issue: modular vs monolithic applications. In Windows, each
> application has to do everything that one might want to do. E.g. Excel has
> to have a spell checker. In Unix, all the little functional modules each do
> one thing well, and you put them together to get the job done. The latter
> approach does not seem to translate well to GUI operation, but what if you
> have a GUI interface for ls, grep, etc... That looks like any of the
> available flowchart drawing applications?
>
> I've always loved that quote about Unix being very friendly, but very
> selective about it's friends. Perl seems that way to me as well.
>
> ---
> James.
>  
>
>   

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