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Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

Is this different from Unix Utils? Every gig I've ever been on where I'm forced to use a Windows box, first thing I do is load the Unix Util exes into some directory and add it to the path. http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

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If you like unixutils, you might like GOW a bit more:

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki

Kept up to date, every .exe (once installed) is self-contained (no external .DLLs) and portable to just about any Windows box I've run into.

No Cygwin or MinGW installation required.

Bash is actually available in the list (albeit an older version) if you really wanted "bash on Windows"

Thanks. I used to use GNUWin32 (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/), but this seems like a good alternative.

This was my thought too, but I pushed GOW to a lower priority in my to-do list after a comment in a recent thread that publicised it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085830

Are you sure it's kept up to date?

The initial github commit has comment "Initial import of the code I developed back in 2006. Nothing has been changed since then.", and nothing has been changed since that commit (with exception of docs, Gow.nsi and gow.vbs files).

Yes, it's different. UnxUtls gives you grep, tar, tr, gzip, and etc. Clink appears to give you shell command completion and history completion.

They are complementary.

Which is nice, because you get fine grained control over which bandaids you put over cmd.exe. This basically gives you readline and not much else, and you don't have to install multiple possibly overlapping bandaids to get it.

There is also busybox for Windows - https://github.com/pclouds/busybox-w32

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