Engineering Workbench
Unix-like working environments for M$-Windows.
- Cygwin – a collection of tools which provide a Linux look and feel environment for Windows.
- MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows – Minimalist GNU for Windows
- Gow (Gnu On Windows) – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
- UnxUtils – GNU utilities for Win32 obsolete
UnxUtils
A bunch of GNU utilities ported to native Win32 (i.e. the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime library msvcrt.dll) provided as ZIP-archive.
- UnxUtils – GNU utilities for Win32.
pro:
- Probably the most frugal solution.
- Has find, gawk, make.
cons:
- No installer. Lack of concept where to install the tools on the Windows box (in c:\, c:\programms or elsewhere). This may be an issue for shell scripts that rely on a dedicated environment (i.e. search path, config files, etc...) and shall be provided to a team or workgroup where each user is free to install the tools in one's sole discretion.
- No Explorer integration (i.e. concept on how the tools shall be called or found)
- Provide broken zsh shell (e.g. crashes on simple commands like ls or env, escape sequences (i.e. colors) ignored, autoload feature not available or broken, etc.).
- Obsolete (last updated in 2003).
Advanced users may be warned. I stumbled on some flaws with the advanced file redirection features of awk or Unix/Windows line endings issues in sed. 