I admit, I am a fan of UNIX tools. But what does that mean? Here's my interpretation:
** A tool does one thing only, and does it properly.
** If you need to do more complex things, chain a set of tools together. After all that's what pipes were invented for command line tools are best (granted, OpenOffice is cool).
** Tools come as source tar balls with simple Makefiles. If you can't find an existing tool, take one that as close as possible to your needs and change it to fit.
** Compilers are your friends.
** Graphical desktops are ok, because they allow you open a bunch of terminals to start a more tools at the same time.
** Documentation comes in form of a "-h" option of the tool. If that's not enough, "Use the source, Luke".
You might think that in today's times of modern GUIs and its slew of colorful applications, this is an old-fashioned ineffective view of the world. Not so, I would like to propose.
Let me make an example. Recently, I needed a tool to figure out the network bandwidth between two machines with a different CPU architectures: SPARC and x86. Luckily both systems run Solaris (actually, with over 4 million Solaris downloads this has probably little to do with luck alone). One was a Sun Blade 150 machine, the other one an old Dell PC.
Where would you start? Oh well, I guess you start where everybody starts with anything nowadays: Google. Try it for yourself,.... google for "UNIX tool to measure network bandwidth" and three clicks later you find yourself at http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ reading about Iperf.
It took me 5 minutes to determine that this is the tool that fits my needs. I downloaded the sources, unpacked them on both machines, changed "Makefiles.rules" to use the free Studio 11 C/C++ compilers, ran "iperf -s" on one box and "iperf -c
92.6 Mbit/s.
Iperf, one example of the right tool for the job.
If you can beat this time, please let me know. I'd love to learn how.
TTQtoA (Total Time from Question to Answer): 20 min
Software Costs (incl. all tools): $0
Job satisfaction: High