You can make your life a little easier and more productive by adding some Unix power to your Windows system.
For a fairly extensive collection of Unix tools — including most of the essentials like less, tail, awk and grep, mv, dd, bzip2 and bunzip2 — on your Windows box, install cygwin. Cygwin is a collection of tools that provide Unix commands on a Windows system. These commands can be as useful on the Windows command line (i.e., within the command prompt window) or within scripts (e.g., .bat files) as they are on Unix.
To get cygwin, browse your way over to cygwin.com. You will find a setup.exe file that you can download and run. If you don’t have administrator access on your Windows system, try renaming the setup.exe file to cygwin.exe or something like that before
double clicking on it. That might get you around any installation problems.
Clicking on the setup.exe (or cygwin.exe) file will open a GUI that allows you to look through a list of the tools that will be installed by default. Click on the + sign to the left of a software category to list its contents. You will then see version numbers next to the tools that will are to be installed. Click on the “Skip” marker if you want to add a tool to the installation rather than have it skipped.
Skip n/a n/a 418k gcc-tools.epoch1-automake (gcc-special) a tool for ...
Skip n/a n/a 578k gcc-tools-epoch2-automake (gcc-special) a tool for ...
Once the installation is complete, open a cygwin terminal by clicking on the link added to your desktop or the item (Cygwin Terminal) in our start menu. You should find
yourself sitting in your home directory (e.g., /home/myself) and if you type pwd, it will tell you just that. Try some Unix commands such as date, ls -la and man bash. Go ahead and cd .. and ls /usr. How about cat /etc/passwd? You might even start thinking you’re working on a Unix system — at least until you come across a command that’s missing — like clear (although there are other ways to accomplish the same thing).
Go ahead and cd over to /usr/bin and try ls and ls | wc -l commands. You’re going to see a lot of files, some with .exe extensions, some without. You’ll also see .dll files.
myself@WindowsBox /usr/bin $ ls [.exe dumper.exe peflagsall addftinfo.exe echo.exe pfbtops.exe afmtodit editrights.exe pgawk.exe apropos egrep.exe pic.exe arch.exe env.exe pic2graph ash.exe envsubst.exe pinky.exe awk eqn.exe pldd.exe banner.exe eqn2graph post-grohtml.exe base64.exe ex poweroff basename.exe expand.exe pr.exe bash.exe expr.exe preconv.exe bashbug factor.exe pre-grohtml.exe bunzip2.exe false.exe printenv.exe bzcat.exe fgrep.exe printf.exe bzcmp file.exe ps.exe bzdiff find.exe ptx.exe bzegrep fmt.exe putclip.exe bzfgrep fold.exe pwd.exe ... $ ls | wc -l 393 $
You might even cd down to / and start to wonder what to do next.
me@WindowsBox / $ ls bin Cygwin.bat Cygwin-Terminal.ico etc lib tmp var cygdrive Cygwin.ico dev home proc usr myself@WindowsBox / $ ls var cache cron lib log run tmp myself@WindowsBox / $ ls tmp myself@WindowsBox / $ ls dev clipboard console full mem port pty1 sda sr0 stdout windows conin dsp kmem mqueue ptmx random sda1 stderr tty zero conout fd kmsg null pty0 scd0 shm stdin urandom
That’s quite a nice Unix playground sitting on our Windows box, but what can you do with it other than take a Unix break from Windows? Actually, quite a bit. For one thing, you can escape the confines of your C:cygwin directory and go to your C: drive with a cd /cygdrive/c command. This takes you to C:, but still from within your Cygwin Terminal. Examine your Windows files:
$ cd /cygdrive/c $ pwd /cygdrive/c $ ls $Recycle.Bin install.res.1036.dll Boot install.res.1040.dll bootmgr install.res.1041.dll BOOTSECT.BAK install.res.1042.dll cygwin install.res.2052.dll Dell install.res.3082.dll Documents and Settings Intel ...
You can then wander up to your home on your Windows system and examine your files with Unix commands:
myself@WindowsBox /cygdrive/c/Users $ cd myself myself@WindowsBox /cygdrive/c/Users/myself $ ls AppData Application Data AWS BoogieMan Contacts Cookies Cruise 2013 ... $ less testing123.txt This is a test
In fact, you can even zap the contents of a file using /dev/null:
myself@WindowsBox /cygdrive/c/Users/myself $ ls -l testfile -rwx------+ 1 mself None 230 May 27 09:47 testfile $ > testfile $ ls -l testfile -rwx------+ 1 mself None 0 May 27 09:49 testfile
Similarly, from Windows, you can open a command prompt and cd over to C:cygwin or even go through the Windows GUI if you are so inclined.
You can also expand your Windows search path within a batch file in much the same that you would a Unix path, but with a couple small changes. Instead of $PATH, Windows uses %path%. Instead of : as a directory separator, Windows uses a ;. You can then use Unix
commands within your Windows scripts to add functionality and ease to your tasks.
path=%path%;C:cygwinbin
The beauty of cygwin is that you can use Unix commands to work on files on Windows systems. This can be a lot faster than moving the files you need to work on to a Unix system, processing them there, and moving them back — especially if you have work you’d like to schedule to run off hours. All the awk’ing, sorting, grep’ing, wc’ing and uniq’ing that you want to do can be done in place.
An extensive online user’s guide is available from the cygwin site and in several formats, including a PDF — easier to use in my estimation — or you csan just read the documentation online at http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/cygwin-ug-net.pdf.
By the way, you don’t have to pay to use cygwin, but it’s wise to read the copyright section of the FAQ if you are planning to use it for porting a proprietary application.
