I didn't know they all came from different companies. I though MS had developed them all from the ground up.

As a personal note, my regex for Word is:
X*^13
X being start of path, ^13 being paragraph (used as end of line)

One think I've spent too long on is doing the equivilant of this SED expression:
sed 's/\(.*\)\/\([^/]*\)/\2/g'

This will take a (UNIX) filepath like this:
/path/to/file1
And give you just "file1" (changing \2 to z1 would give you "/path/to"

Oh god, get that sed command away from me!

I had to write a sed-type utility in C last year. F*cking horrible it was.

Sed FTL.

SED is fudging brilliant! What do you use? Cut?

Nope. I've never had a use for the utility.

I wish it didn't exist!

On Windows, what user is the equal to the UNIX root?
Our system admin doesn't seem to delete some files on the server because it claims that they are open or just "access is denied". I know that certainly under Solaris 10 as the root user you can go:

And that'll happily sit there and delete pretty much your whole system (I never left if long enough to see if it came up against problems).

Who can do this under Windows? It's not like we want to delete C:\ just some user created files which have gotten their permissions or locks corrupted...

The Administrator is the equivalent of root, but you can't delete files which are currently locked by another process. They would need to kill off the process accessing the files first.

If the locks are corrupted, then you might need to wait until a restart.

Also, it is possible to restrict the Administrator from having access to certain folders - for security reasons - so they might need to add rights to that folder first.

Thanks for confirming that Dave, we were unsure if support were just being unhelpful or if it was a limitation of the system.

We have the problem that the all of our files sit on the network and a lot of packets get lost (apparently), our group data server is just down the corridor, but our data does a round trip of about ten miles to get the said server, this tends to mean that a lot of files get their locks corrupted and means we can't do anything with the files. In some cases we have needed to access or delete a file urgently and have had to jump through hoops to get the server restarted in the middle of the day, which has caused other problems for other people using the server.

We can't get our network upgraded because we are due to close the site down in the next ten years, and the government doesn't want to be seen as wasting money, or something like that...

Claim for duck pond cleaning, then spend the money on a gigabit switch and a couple of cables and pocket the rest!