Maybe I've been hanging around with too many mouse-clickers and script kiddies - I didn't know there were that many command line junkies out there!

May their tribe increase!

Originally, yeah, and that's probably what most of us really use it for. I've heard you can even run Windows 95 on it, should anyone want to.

And the "recent" incarnations have been stable for a while at least in internet time.

It's not easy (and may require special builds) to get it working with a printer, which is often a requirement for real work, but I'm told it's doable (my main "work" use is to convert old documents from WP5.1 and AmiPro to WP 6, which can then be read by modern versions of Word, and I'm not concerned about letter-perfect layout.)

I installed it once, and then never did anything with it, so I have no idea ... I just know that it's out there. On Windows 7 and Server 2008R2 it's free to download and try, so no cost but a bit of time to mess with it.

Interesting! Had never heard of this.
Most recent release is 0.8.0 (2014-02-15).

I just saw this useful summary on the Gow page:

Other Similar Projects

• GNU utilities for Win32: Quite literally the grand-daddy of Unix utilities projects. It hasn't been updated since 2003. Gow originally borrowed from these utilities but has updated many of them and added all of the installer goodness that you've come to expect.
• GnuWin: An excellent project with lots of utilities. GnuWin might be for you if you just want one or two utilities rather than the Cygwin-"light" suite that Gow provides.
• MSYS: From MinGW, well known as the basis for msysgit (in fact, if you have msysgit on your machine, then you already have these utilities).
• UWIN: Software package created by David Korn at AT&T which allows programs written for the operating system Unix be built and run on Microsoft Windows