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GNU Win32 and MSYS are awesome, but it seems like all of their tools use the ANSI version of the Windows API, rather than the Unicode versions.

Obviously, those are meant for Windows 95 and 98, not Windows XP and Windows 7... and they cause lots of problems with any atypical file names, strings, etc.

Is there any similar POSIX toolset (other than Cygwin) that uses the Unicode versions of the Windows API (and which thus supports Unicode)?

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Why exclude Cygwin? Also, note that MSYS is a fork of Cygwin. – ak2 Jan 3 at 6:02
For clarity, could you give an example of an atypical file name and an atypical string and the problem each causes. – RedGrittyBrick Jan 3 at 10:24
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I just ran touch ╧.txt in a Cygwin bash shell, and it shows up with the correct name in Cygwin ls under xterm, in Windows command prompt, and in Windows Explorer. (It doesn't look right under the default Cygwin bash shell, which uses the same terminal emulator as the Windows command prompt.) It might help to know just why you're "not looking for Cygwin". – Keith Thompson Jan 3 at 21:46
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@KeithThompson: Well, you can treat it, for all intents and purposes, as though my employer has banned Cygwin at work and forbidden my discussing why I can't use it. I don't want to fight him about it. If you still can't help, then that's totally fine; thanks for trying anyhow. – Mehrdad Jan 3 at 22:52
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@Mehrdad: If you can't provide information, that's a different story. That wasn't clear (to me) from the original question, or from your previous comments. I suggest that something like "I can't use Cygwin for reasons I can't disclose" in the question would have been useful. To clarify, MSYS would be ok if it worked? – Keith Thompson Jan 3 at 22:59
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Microsoft's very own Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA). Only available with Windows Ultimate and Enterprise though.

Correction: SUA does not have Unicode support. According to its locale -a command, it only supports ISO-8859-1, EUC-JP, and SJIS.

On a related note, MKS Toolkit, which is another Unix-like environment for Windows, also does not support Unicode in filenames, according to its unicode.5 manpage.

MKS Toolkit utilities cannot handle non-OEM characters in file names unless the locale supports double byte character (such as the Japanese locale). Consequently, even though the utilities support UTF-8 and Unicode characters in files on all platforms, to achieve maximum portability across all Windows platforms, all file names used in scripts for utilities like awk, sh, csh and others should contain only ASCII characters from the OEM code page.

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Yea I already knew it existed but didn't even try to see if it's Unicode because I don't have Ultimate/Enterprise. +1 anyway though. – Mehrdad Jan 3 at 16:15
Actually, are you sure that it supports Unicode? I just tried ls on the Windows XP version on a file with the name ╧ and got back ls: -: No such file or directory. – Mehrdad Jan 3 at 16:29
Nope, looks like you're wrong. I just tried the Windows 8 version, and ls gave back - as the file name (but no error this time). I piped the output to a text file and then viewed the contents, and verified it was not a console displaying issue. – Mehrdad Jan 3 at 16:35
Sorry, I misremembered. SUA does use the Unicode private use area to represent characters such as ':' that aren't allowed in Windows filenames, in the same way as Cygwin, so I guess I wrongly implied that it has general Unicode support. – ak2 Jan 3 at 21:17
Remember that the Windows console (the equivalent of terminal window) has some trouble supporting Unicode -- it starts in a OEM codepage by default, and switching to UTF-16 or UTF-8 (chcp 65000 or 65001) breaks stuff. It's not always the fault of the program, even if it uses Unicode APIs it can't always display Unicode characters to the console. Use some executable inspector to verify what kind of APIs the program uses. – grawity Jan 3 at 23:33
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