What is the best and most complete implementation of Unix system commands?

Question

I've found a few (unfortunately, they are bookmarked at home and I'm at work, so no links), but I was wondering if anyone had any opinions about any of them (love it, hate it, whatever) so I could make a good decision. I think I'm going to use Cygwin for my Unix commands on Windows, but I'm not sure how well that's going to work, so I would love for alternatives and I'm sure there are people out there interested in this who aren't running Cygwin.

Answer 1

These work very well for me: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/.

Cygwin is not so good on Vista or 64 bit, so I stopped using it a while back.

[Edit] The asker should add "on windows" to the question to avoid snarky "duh Linux" answers.

Answer 2

Linux/BSD :)

Answer 3

Why vote down this question? It's obviously meant to be tongue in cheek is it worth the voter and the receiver losing rep over? Can't you people leave anything at zero and mark up the answers you want to see float rather than mark down the funny one liners?

In answer to the question I've used Cygwin in the past but always found it clunky and wanting. I don't think it's the tools problem but mine but I have book marked Eric's suggestion of unxutils for when my new windows machine arrives tomorrow.

Answer 4

I use Cygwin alot.

I use it for any mvn commands, find, grep, perl scp and all the other stuff i got used to use all the years I only worked on FreeBSD desktops and servers.

I have my old .vimrc, .zshrc, my .ssh/config and all the other nice stuff. I use rxvt.exe instead of cmd.exe which made all the difference for me! Resize, decent buffer, fonts and so on.

Answer 5

Powershell is what you are looking for, it contains aliases for a lot of UNIX commands and a lot more besides. John

Answer 6

I use Cygwin, but I have used the Berkley Utilities in the past. They worked well enough, if you are used to DOS and you just want the commands. There are some alternatives listed at TinyApps.

Maybe you could also consider running a command line version of Linux in a virtual machine? Colinux is also an option, but it's immature.

Answer 7

UnxUtils isn't updated as often and isn't as complete as Cygwin but runs natively just like any other Windows command line utility.

Cygwin acts more like a Linux command line emulator. It does feel pretty clunky but it is easier to port utilities to it and this is more complete than UnxUtils.

I personally don't like Cygwin. It really does seem to be wanting. Unless it has some specific tool you want that only works in Cygwin I'd find native ports.

http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/index.mhtml is a nice Perl package for Windows.

http://www.locate32.net/ - I've always liked locate. Much faster than Grep for finding files by name.

Answer 8

Microsoft distributes a UNIX API compatibility layer for Windows NT-based OSes, as well as many common UNIX command line utilities that run on top of this compatibility layer. Unlike Cygwin, it doesn't sit on top of the Win32 subsystem, but instead interfaces with the NT native APIs directly. It supports features that may be difficult to implement on top of Win32, such as case-sensitive filenames and fork().

The Windows 2K/XP version is called Windows Services for UNIX (SFU). SFU is a free download from Microsoft, and also includes an NFS server and client.

The Windows Vista version is called Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA). SUA is included in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista, but does not include any NFS support.

Neither SFU nor SUA include an X server. It is possible (but possibly ironic?) to use the free Cygwin X server with SFU/SUA applications.

The Wikipedia entries on SFU and Interix have more details and history.

Answer 9

andLinux is a distribution of coLinux, which runs the entire Linux kernel inside Windows (with better performance than a VM). Then, with the help of Xming (an X windows server for Windows), you can have Linux windows mingle along side Windows windows.

With that, pretty much everything Linux-based will just work. You're not limited to just the tools that have been ported to Cygwin, you can apt-get anything you want.

andLinux also includes a few niceties, such as desktop shortcuts to launch Linux apps, a launcher that lives in your tray, and context menu items (right click a text file and you can open it in Kate)

The downsides of andLinux are:

1. Accessing the Linux filesystem is tricky. You have to set up Samba in both directions.
2. Connecting to a Linux program from a remote connection is also tricky (but possible)