Unix commands on windows: Uwin
Uwin is a superb alternative to cygwin, created by AT&T Research group and currently available as free download (AT&T says its "for students and universities", but in fact anyone can download it). Uwin is truly unix for windows because it is an official fork of the POSIX standard tools built for windows.
The official site for uwin (at the time of this writing) is very messy, and filled with links that keep throwing you back and forth, I find it hard to navigate, which is why I have to blog about it here.
Advantages:
@ Light-wight
Its much cleaner than cygwin and extrememtly light-weight. Seriously, the base package 16 MB in size, includes all common unix tools like sed, awk ....
@ Better integration with the native windows OS
You can run all the common unix commands right inside the windows command shell. You can even execute shell scripts from inside the windows command shell.
@ Power of Unix/POSIX
The base package includes ls, ps, pwd, cksum, diff, vi, grep, fgrep, egrep, awk, nawk, find, sed, cut, sort, ssh, scp, touch, tail, getopts, getconf, basename, dirname, cp, mv, date, sdiff, tr, uname, who, and much more (and also the unix tool more ;) ).
@ Add softwares
You can also build additional softwares from sources.
Dis-advantages:
@ SSH1
Like cygwin, the default version of SSH that ships with uwin is version 1. But, thank God there is a OpenSSH for windows update available, which will give you the SSH Version 2, so this is not such a big deal then.
Links:
- Uwin
(requires username and password)
This will give you easy access to all the uwin commands (like ps, pwd, cksum, vi, grep, fgrep, egrep, awk, nawk, find, sed, sort, ssh, scp, touch, tail) from a standard cmd window.
