Blog Post

Power up Windows with old guard Unix tools

ryaneberly

Most of us who’ve spent time tinkering with Linux or other Unix flavors have quickly discovered that there are some powerful tools available on most standard *nix installs that do not have an equivalent in windows.

Here are a couple of simple tasks:

Search multiple files for a specific word or series of words. (grep <pattern> <filepattern>)
Rename a list of files accord to pattern. (i.e. change all files ending in *.txt to *.rtf)
More powerful scripting than good old DOS Batch files.
Comparing the differences between 2 (text) files (diff <file> <file>)
Pull a file off the web without firing up a browser. (wget)
Watch the end of a file for changes, such as an application log file. (tail -f <file>)
telnet, ssh clients
Run an Xwindows client session in Windows. (startx)
Tell where an executable will be run from. (which)

Cygwin (cygwin.com) provides a great tool set for those who find themselves in Windows environments, but want to leverage the power of unix tools.

I first discovered Cygwin when working on a contract basis in software quality assurance (testing) for a large well-known semiconductor manufacturer. We were doing most of our work via telnet sessions on an AIX (unix) server, and I wanted to get a larger/friendly command window by running Xwindows locally and exporting the display from my session on the server to my local workstation. Unix has had remote desktop for a long time… As a result, all the tools that I had grown to appreciate in AIX were suddenly available on my workstation. I’ve kept a Cygwin install on my workstation ever since.

Installation:

Download and run setup.exe from cygwin.com.
Click through the options [defaults should be ok], and select a download site.
You will get a organized list of all the packages that are available. Modify the selected packages as you wish- the more you select, the larger the install footprint.
Setup caches what you download so if you want to add a package later, you can do so without downloading the whole system again.

Recommended modifications from the default packages.

Add Web/wget – download files off the web from the command line ( script heaven)
Add Editors/vim – If you like the vi editor, otherwise skip it

Installation will take a few minutes. When it’s done, open your command prompt (Start->Run, ‘cmd’) and start experimenting (no ‘rm’ commands). Cygwin adds its bin folder to your PATH, so the commands are available. Certain windows commands share names with their approximate unix equivalents, so you need to give the explicit path to the cygwin folder when calling these. ‘find’ is an example of this.

Here’s some examples:
C:>which find
/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32/find

No wonder it wasn’t working like I expected! Not that windows drive c: is mounted as /cygdrive/c, and most of the tools know how to navigate pure windows paths, but if possible use the unix form.

C:>echo test > somefile.txt
C:>cygwinbinfind somefil*

C:> echo testing >> somefile.txt
C:> echo something completely different >> somefile.txt
C:> echo testing >> somefile.txt
C:> echo testing >> somefile2.txt
C:> grep different *
C:> grep testing *
C:> grep -v testing somefile.txt

C:> cat somefile.txt | sed -e “s/ing/er/g”
C:> cat somefile.txt | sed -e “s/ing/[]/g”

I won’t get into how to use all these tools here. Google ‘grep’ or ‘sed’ or unix shell script for more info.

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