Difference between UnxUtils and GNU CoreUtils

Question

I am a Windows user who wants programs like grep and sed along with other utilities like ls, cut etc in my command prompt. I came across 2 packages which would accomplish this

• UnxUtils
• GNU Coreutils

I would like to know what is the difference between the two both feature wise and more importantly performance wise before I choose between them. From what I have seen Coreutils is a super set of UnxUtils. Is this correct ?

Answer 1

Unxutils are windows native, and have no dependancies - but haven't been updated in a while, and are a subset of coreutils. You'd need a *nix style environment for coreutils, so you'd need to run them in cygwin or similar

Answer 2

unxutils has old versions of a bunch of useful utilities. including grep for example.

gnuwin32 includes coreutils which has some stuff, but coreutils alone won't give you grep or wget, which unxutils has. But since unxutils is old.. The thing to do is to download those useful utilities from the gnuwin32 set. It means getting them individually. But that's the way it's gotta be! i've run into issues with the old version of sed, or the old version of wget, which unxutils uses, one could work around them perhaps, but when you look for help, other people are using the later versions.

unxutils is good if you want to be really lazy! it's dead straight forward to install.. just a zip file extract to a directory, and you have all the commands.. add them to your path.

gnuwin32 is a bit more work to install 'cos you download coreutils, run the installation for that.. Then grep is separate.. and wget.. each installed separately.. you also get documentation e.g. here is an example of the directory structure! C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\doc\coreutils\5.3.0\coreutils-5.3.0>coreutils.chm not so neat.. but there.

I used to use unxutils, but gnuwin32 is the way to go! and it does have more for sure.. coreutils+the individual apps offered, include anything unxutils has + more. There's are also individual collections other than coreutils.. there's util-linux-ng in gnuwin32, which I think is a bunch of bsd style commands which have been ported to linux, and now ported of course to windows.

by the way, perhaps you could always try to put together your own subset of gnuwin32 e.g. coreutils, grep, wget.. in a zip file!

Answer 3

Coreutils from GnuWin32 has 'cut'; see http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm