Tip #15: Unix Utilities for Windows XP
Today's tip is on installing Unix/Linux utilities for Windows XP/2000... Whether you've been using Unix commands for years ( and silently curse as you type "ls -l" at a Windows command prompt), or if you'd like to become familiar with some basic Unix commands, you'll be happy to know that many of these utilities have been ported to run natively on a Win32 system...
While Cygwin is an obvious option for Unix power-users, these individually available GNU utilities will provide the same basic functionality at a Windows prompt...
The individual packages can be downloaded from here... The Core utilities package includes the file, shell, and text utilities, which should cover a majority of your command line needs...
Once installed, you'll need to add the path to the utilities to your PATH environment variable... To do this, click on Start/Run, and enter sysdm.cpl... This will bring up the System Properties Dialog... Click on the Advanced tab, then the Environment Variables button... In the System Variables pane, scroll down to "Path" and double-click it... At the end of this line, type the following:
;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin
The semicolon is important as it separates the individual elements of the Path variable...
Now that you have added the GnuWin directory to your path, Unix commands can be executed on the command line and run natively on Win32 without any emulation layer as shown below:
If you have any questions, please leave a comment...
While Cygwin is an obvious option for Unix power-users, these individually available GNU utilities will provide the same basic functionality at a Windows prompt...
The individual packages can be downloaded from here... The Core utilities package includes the file, shell, and text utilities, which should cover a majority of your command line needs...
Once installed, you'll need to add the path to the utilities to your PATH environment variable... To do this, click on Start/Run, and enter sysdm.cpl... This will bring up the System Properties Dialog... Click on the Advanced tab, then the Environment Variables button... In the System Variables pane, scroll down to "Path" and double-click it... At the end of this line, type the following:
;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin
The semicolon is important as it separates the individual elements of the Path variable...
Now that you have added the GnuWin directory to your path, Unix commands can be executed on the command line and run natively on Win32 without any emulation layer as shown below:
If you have any questions, please leave a comment...
posted by Jameser @ 8:46 PM
2 Comments:
At 1/23/2008 6:06 PM,
Anonymous said…
Awsome tool
At 1/09/2009 11:25 AM,
' said…
Note that following these instructions won't work for commands that have the same name as Windows commands, like "find". I had to rename that one to "gnufind" to make it work. The other way is to put the gnu path first instead of last, so it finds the gnu tools before windows tools.
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