Gnu Tools for Windows

Question

I was looking for Gnu Tools for Windows and came across two links:

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

and

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

Does anyone know what is the difference between them and which one has more comprehensive or better tools ?

Answer 1

unxutils was last updated in 2003. Avoid that, too old.

gnuwin32 is new. No idea what its lasting power is, but of the two you mention, use this one.

If you want comprehensive, you're after Cygwin, http://www.cygwin.com/ which is the "standard" method, but is ... rather bulky. And the moment you have some third-party software installed, where the Windows binary was built using Cygwin and which bundles the DLL, you enter DLL hell again, which I've never debugged to figure out because I've avoided it after the first time I saw it happen.

Answer 2

In a comment Madhur Ahuja asks if cygwin is portable - the answer is no and yes. The standard install of cygwin will NOT support portability it relies on a large set of files.

BUT, if you only need a few of the tools that cygwin provides, for example sed, gawk and grep, you can put those and the files they depend on, on a USB and it will work.

The below list of files, all located in the /bin dir of cygwin, will allow you to run - find, gawk, grep, ls and sed from a USB drive.

cyggcc_s-1.dll
cygicons-0.dll
cygiconv-2.dll
cygintl-8.dll
cygpcre-0.dll
cygreadline7.dll
cygsigsegv-2.dll
cygwin1.dll
find.exe
gawk.exe
grep.exe
ls.exe
sed.exe

Answer 3

Recently came to know gow[1]. Installed it and it works quite well. cygwin is too heavy.

1. http://wiki.github.com/bmatzelle/gow/

Answer 4

MobaXterm is a rich ftp/ssh/VNC/RDP/Telnet/rsh client and X-server as well, but also has a lot of GNU tools built in to use interactively