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I'm fairly comfortable navigating a modern Windows file system, but when it comes to C and anything but very simple command prompt tools I'm clueless. I would love to be able to use pattern search tools (especially gfind and zfind), but I'm worried that since I don't know what I'm doing, I may somehow screw things up terribly for the program or even my computer.

Should I charge ahead and hope for the best, or just stick to cobbling other people's findings into childish "battleships" that shoot gliders at each other?

Yeah, you should.

Platypus6 wrote:I'm fairly comfortable navigating a modern Windows file system, but when it comes to C and anything but very simple command prompt tools I'm clueless. I would love to be able to use pattern search tools (especially gfind and zfind), but I'm worried that since I don't know what I'm doing, I may somehow screw things up terribly for the program or even my computer.

Should I charge ahead and hope for the best, or just stick to cobbling other people's findings into childish "battleships" that shoot gliders at each other?

I encourage you to try. What's the worst that can happen?

I'm on windows too and I've been able to get several programs working. Usually, I use Cygwin for running programs like gfind and zfind. Cygwin was required to get apgsearch working on Windows, and it pretty easy to compile most common GoL programs for me. (speaking of apgsearch, you could also give that a go; I don't think it was avaliable when you were last active.) You just have to be sure to install the right packages. If Cygwin doesn't work, than you can try IDEs like Code::Blocks, which is what I use if I can't get Cygwin to work.

I don't think it's very likely that you'll damage the program or your computer. You'd have to type some very particular commands to do serious damage to your computer, and if you "damage" the program, you can always re-install it.

P.S. While they may not be very useful, I still think those battleships were pretty cool.

I started typing this before Goldtiger's response was posted. I'll post it anyway, since it might contain additional useful information.

I encourage you to do this. If you want to run gfind or zfind, you will need to compile them with a C compiler. This isn't too dificult, so don't worry. Since you use Windows, I recomend using cygwin. You might want to take a look at the brief LifeWiki tutorial on compiling C programs. There is also a tutorial on how to use gfind.

If you struggle with any of the steps, you can always ask questions in the scripts forum.

So anyway, gfind is useful.

Thank you everyone for the encouragement! I will do this!

By the way, don't think I have lost interest in my battleships... I'm mainly looking for c/3 ship components xD