Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Unix command line tools for Windows

Since about 1999, I have been experimenting with alternative operating systems. Today, my main PC triple-boots Mac OS X (thanks to the InsanelyMac community!), Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

Two out of these three operating systems provide the very powerful bourne again shell (bash). While in Windows, most administration tasks can be accomplished using the pretty (or sometimes not-so-pretty) GUI. This is becoming increasingly possible under Linux, thanks to distros like Ubuntu and SuSE. However, to get maximum control over *nix based systems like Mac OS X or Linux, one needs to get comfortable with the command line terminal.

Since 2 out of my 3 OSes are *nix systems, they provide the very powerfull bash shell. As a result, when using Windows, I used to long for the basic unix commands like cat, head, tail, grep and the like (in addition to getting annoyed at constantly getting "Bad command or file name" after typing 'ls').

After a bit of googling, I found this site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils. The zip package available there provides most of those unix commands I missed the most when using Windows. (Finally, grep and wget in cmd.exe!)

Notably missing are the usual Linux text-editors like vi/vim, emacs, nano or pico. These can be found here: ftp://ftp.uni-koeln.de/pc/win32/editor/00index.htm

Finally, for playing media files from the command line, there's MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

And that's it. You now have the familiar unix tools for those times when you have to use a Windows command prompt.

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