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Cygwin
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tinjaw:
I see a lot of request for command line tools and for free software. Just a quick reminder not to forget about Cygwin. :Thmbsup: With Cygwin loaded you get access to many of the tools available to *NIX users that do many of the things you are looking for. Many small utils piped together can be very powerful.
mwb1100:
You might also check out UnxUtils (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/). The UnxUtils package gas many of the same GNU command line utilties compiled directly to the Win32 API instead of to the cygwin posix API DLL.
The advantages are:
1) you don't need to have the cygwin.dll somewhere on the path (admittedly, this is a pretty minor item)
2) the cygwin API has differences in how drives & paths are specfied on the command line (at least it did years ago when I last tried the Cygwin tools), so you have to learn to use /c/somedir/myfile.txt (or something similar) instead of c:\somedir\myfile.txt. The cygwin method is much more natural for Unix die-hards, while the UnxUtils syntax is more natural for someone like me who's more used to Windows.
The disadvantages are:
1) the UnxUtils package is not as continuously maintained as cygwin and the utilities provided are somewhat older than you'll find in a current cygwin package. The UnxUtils package has not been updated in a long while (since 2003), but then again, how often does 'grep' need updating?
f0dder:
I've never really liked cygwin - it was pretty buggy when I first tried using it (which at least partly was because I was one a 9x machine), but it never really felt 'right'. I also dislike cygwin.dll and their whole unix emulation idea. UnxUtils has some good stuff, and if you want GCC on windows there's mingw32 (which unfortunately take ages to update to more recent software).
Edvard:
LOVE Unxutils :-*
that plus the Windows port of Midnight Commander (the one true file manager for Unix) and Windows command line Tab completion (just like Bash! :-* )and I can finally live a little more comfortably when the need arises for the little black window...
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