Forrest Christian wrote:

> Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> How many is "few"? There are actually "quite a few" -- if that is what 
>> you mean :)
> 
> What I meant was specifically that Win32-specific (or more specifically
> XP/Win2K/NT) command-line, text based (no GUI) programs are actually
> quite rare.  Typically if you see a text-based executable, it has been
> around long enough that it will work under just a vanilla copy of DOS,
> since that was what it was originally developed on.    

Doesn't match my experience. Many of the command line apps I use are Win32.
Most of the command line apps that come with Win2k and WinXP (and their
resource kit) are Win32 apps. The MinGW (and other) ports of *x tools are
Win32 apps. All of the compilers (C, C++) and interpreters (Python, PHP,
JScript, AutoIt3) I use are Win32. My (command line) backup and virus
scanner are Win32 apps. I don't think I have a single app left from the DOS
days way back that hasn't found a (better) replacement :)

> By the time that people were writing for Win32, the whole command-line
> interface had become rather extinct, so people pretty much wrote for the
> GUI.

Of course the large majority of Windows apps written today are GUI apps.
But depending on what you do, there are quite a few command line tools --
and I think any more or less recent command line app that was written for a
Windows system is a Win32 app that doesn't run on DOS.

> That said, I do know that there are a quite a few Win32 command line 
> apps out there, but not nearly as many as there are DOS command line 
> apps.  

I don't have any hard numbers, but from the presence on my system, I doubt
this. I don't think I have a single DOS app left (ok, there's probably the
one or other that comes with WinXP), among possibly more than hundred Win32
command line apps.

Gerhard

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