BigLar

OK - this is probably all old hat to the gurus here, but -

As I was fooling around with the hosts file, it got to be somewhat clumsy because the files tend to be rather large. I found myself wishing I had some of the neat UNIX tools for handling text stuff. Then I remembered at one time I had got hold of a number of the -NIX utilities that had been converted to DOS.

I still had them available, so I stuffed a few of them in the system32 folder (since it was already on the path). Even though they were converted to good old 16-bit DOS, a lot of them still work fine. So far, grep, wc, and find seem to work fine.

As time goes on, I imagine I will find more of them that work - I really missed grep - from the command line, it's a lot easier than going through menus, etc.

Well, that is all.

_kurt

Check out the gnuwin32 project.

BigLar

Oh yeah - I'm sure there's lots of stuff. But what I had on hand was just that - stuff I had on hand. No installation, no .dll's, no hassles. Just copied them in and they worked.

Since they were compiled for 16-bit DOS, I was really surprised so many of them actually worked.

Gawd - I remember downloading them (28.8 modem) about 20 years ago. Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose.

LIH Prem

www.cygwin.com

It has everything you want including the shells, ssh etc and config files in their natural places.

-David

HDQDD

+1. Or even better, just get a proper *nix box.

gfunkdave

Which can be free with Virtualbox and any Linux flavor.

Internaut

Back in the 90s, I was making good use of awk, sed, grep and so on, for Windows. These days? Oracle Virtualbox + Linux VM. I wish Microsoft would implement all these tools natively, for Windows (a terrible OS for text processing, but with qualities of its own).

Mikity

Another vote for Cygwin - it is also easy to keep up to date!
Relevant: http://lifehacker.com/362316/use-uni...command-prompt

BigLar

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

I was looking for some stuff in my hosts file (see another thread) and thinking that this would be a lot easier if I could just grep, cut, sort, wc, etc. like I do under Unix. Then I thought of that stuff I had on hand, and tried it out, and it worked! (As long as I wasn't trying to dick around with the file system).

But, as others have pointed out, code written specifically to work under Windows would be a much better solution. Still, when you're in a hurry, any car will do, rather than holding out for the limo.

Mikity

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

nkedel

Shouldn't be surprising; 16 bit DOS and Windows are still supported on every 32-bit version of Windows (even 8!)

64-bit versions of Windows, all the way back to XP/2003 (or even further back, to NT on Dec Alpha!) abandon 16-bit support.

There's also DOSBOX, an absolutely free and absolutely wonderful DOS emulator that runs on pretty much every OS out there.

Indeed. Or there are a bunch of other ways of running both Windows/Linux with one or both virtualized, depending on one's hypervisor of choice and how old the hardware is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/.../cc771470.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=2391

I (heart) Cygwin. It's not quite perfect Unix, and it's not quite native Windows, but I haven't found anything else that does what it does anywhere near as well.

stut

Another vote for Cygwin here. The big advantage is having it installable on heavily policied machines. Having vim, sed, awk, perl and all such tools is a joy!

I will give GNUwin a try, though. Although, as we all know, GNU's Not Unix...

Mikity

Mostly written for playing DOS games though (although in its more recent incarnations it can even run WIndows 3.1)...

Mikity

Thank you for the links! How would you compare the "Windows Services for Unix" experience with Cygwin?

BobbySteel

Gow is a nice lighter-weight alternative
https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki