Unix Utilities on Windows
Feeling crippled on Windows by not having access to such commands as grep, awk, tail, less … ? Go here to get a copy of these utilities ported to the Win32 platform. They’ve made my life much easier when I’m trying to do some quick command-line trickery on a Windows box.
Hey, TT…
I humbly suggest an alternate distribution point:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
As this is a regularly updated distribution point; the UnxUtils link is a one-man-show and the tools were gathered at a single point in time, and they are quite out of date… it was handy in its time, when Windows compiles for these utilities were scattered efforts and a single archive was handy.
At the GnuWin32 distribution point, you’ll find much-improved updates for (at least) wget, grep, and tail.
Thanks for the tip, Andrew! Nice to know. It does look like that would be a better place to go to obtain and maintain up-to-date packages. One thing I like about the UnxUtils package, however, is that every utilitiy comes down as a self-contained executable with no installation or dependencies required. So to use on any box, all I have to do is copy it over and then run it.
Wish I knew how the original author created them and/or that he would keep them up to date. If I ever get the time it’d be interesting to go through the UnxUtils tools and find out just how out of date they are. Grep from UnxUtils looks like it’s version 2.5.1, for example, while the GnuWin32 has version 2.5.3. Biggest issue would be whether there are any security issues with the versions available in UnxUtils.
Another thing I always intended to research but never did was Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463212.aspx). I believe it comes with all of the UNIX shell capabilities one could ever want.