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Unix Shell in Windows?

The other day I was wonking to Steve about how the tools in windows are mostly useless, especially the stupid Window’s Find feature, which always seems to omit results (which for me is useless). So he recommended that I try Cygwin, an implementation of the BASH Shell that runs under windows. I gotta say this is about the best thing ever! This takes me way back to my Pratt and Whitney days, back to a happier time (from a programming standpoint). This, coupled with a new installation of Perl I threw on last week almost makes me feel like a real programmer again.

You can’t even imagine how many times in the last few days I’ve typed
fgrep -iHR pattern *

I’m grinning ear to ear.

3 thoughts on “Unix Shell in Windows?

  1. Trying to do anything on a Windows machine without installing Cygwin is pointless. Give me bash, find, grep, cut, and xargs and I can move mountains.

  2. Hi Steve (and others),

    I ended up reading your mail on the list while searching for some Unix C Shells on Windows (NT/2000). I was wondering whether you could help me locate a C shell for windows. One I found was from Hamilton labs but I’m having a problem sourcing it. Could you please let me know alternatives. Cygwin needs me to install the entire OS environment. I need just a lighter C shell.

    Thanks in advacne

  3. Go ahead and install Cygwin. You’ll be glad you did. If you did somehow find a distribution of just a shell, it would be useless without the rest of the Unix tools (ls, cat, cut, grep, etc), which you get with Cygwin.

    Installing Cygwin isn’t like installing a new OS, it doesn’t take over you computer, you just end up with some new executables and DLLs.

    Once you’ve got Cygwin installed, if you really really want Csh, you can install the Tcsh package which is a free clone of Csh.

    Bash, the default shell under Cygwin, is way better than Csh though.

    http://cygwin.com

    http://www.cygwin.com/packages/tcsh/

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