Question

I am used to some Unix utilites for simple things like line counts, word counts, and the like.

Are there any utilities available for Windows where we can use *nix functionality?

Answer 1

You can look at Cygwin. It is a collection of UNIX tools that you can run under Windows

Answer 2

There is GNU utilities for Win32 if you don't want to install Cygwin. Plus, MinGW provides MSYS which includes GNU core utilities.

Answer 3

For a no-hassle, no cygwin pain set of UNIX utils, check out UnixUtils on SourceForge. They just work out of the box.

Answer 4

Check out MSYS (a contraction of "Minimal SYStem"). Just grab this file and be happy.

It's a Bourne Shell command line interpreter system that I highly recommend as an alternative to Microsoft's cmd.exe. It provides a general purpose command line environment like grep and awk.

I use it daily for ad hoc scripting and I love it. Also installing is simpler comparing to Cygwin.

And do not get confused with MinGW. MinGW is just complete programming environment (eg. compiler, headers, linker, etc). This probably you don't need.

Answer 5

GNU Win32 is a reasonable up to date version of the GNU command line utils for Windows.

Edit: Strangely, I can't find wc on the list of tools GnuWin32 includes, so it may not be useful in this particular instance.

Answer 6

No-one's mentioned Microsoft Windows Services for Unix yet.

Answer 7

What about using Powershell, who is kind of shell for Windows.

It's a little bit different than *nix shells, but it can access to the .NET Framework.

Answer 8

You can take a look at cygwin.

Answer 9

You mean something like that...?

Cygwin

That was the first name that came to my mind...

Answer 10

Cygwin gives you a powerful UNIX environment on the Windows platform. I use Cygwin primarily for the command-line capabilities (and often). See www.cygwin.com.

Regards, --daniel

Answer 11

Check out Cygwin.