Fabbri Systems

[admin]

When developing software on Windows, I often miss the powerful tools available on Unix (e.g. Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD). I miss the powerful command shells such as bash (batch files are a joke). I miss tools like diff, patch, grep, and wget.

There are multiple ways of adding these commands to your Windows environment. Two obvious approaches are to port the programs to the Windows runtime, or provide a compatibility layer which existing code can run on top of.

The first approach, to install native win32 ports of these commands, can be accomplished at unxutils.sourceforge.net.
(Thanks to jafproject for the link.)

The second approach of installing a unix-like runtime on top of windows can be implemented by downloading Cygwin.

I haven't tried the native Win32 binaries yet (first approach), but it seems that the benefit of using Cygwin instead is that you get a more seamless unix-like environment. I'd rather use diff, grep, patch, wget, and so on from a nice Bash command shell than from the silly windows command prompt. The Win32 binaries may be easier to install, however.