
Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin - joshbaptiste
https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow
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runjake
This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity
in 10 months.

Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which
is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves.

It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid
projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a
project seriously when it's written in VBScript because so many of its
constructs are shoddy.

But again, those last two paragraphs are meant as advice for living projects,
which this one is not.

~~~
mkl
Plus it's been submitted multiple times in the last few months already:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3312009>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085022>

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wazoox
No, for many years the lightweight alternative has been mingw.
<http://www.mingw.org/>

~~~
zapman449
GOW seems to be more focused on a userland environment, whereas mingw is
focused on enabling developers to link against unix libraries in a windows
environment. Sure there's msggrep, and msgfilter as userland in mingw, but GOW
gives you direct access to 'ls', 'gfind', 'grep', etc, and doesn't care a fig
about giving access to libz.

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willvarfar
The bigger purpose of cygwin is to be able to compile your unix c/c++ to run
on Windows. The shell utils is a small part of it, and better covered by
things like UnxUtils and the various sets of binaries of the actual unix shell
utils that people have packaged already.

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jamesu
My only problem with Cygwin is that installing and updating packages is a pain
since you need to use the setup program. Apart from that it works great for
what I use it for - a unixy shell with ports of a few tools I like using.

~~~
beagle3
apt-cyg makes that much less painful:

<http://code.google.com/p/apt-cyg/>

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nilsimsa
I've been using UnxUtils as a lightweight alternative for a while now. Its
available on sourceforge.

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asual
I have been using this package for months and I'm happy with it. My setup
includes console2 + mingw (git for windows) + gow and it meets my
expectations. I don't care if it's written in VBScript as long as it works. I
have OSX at home and I can always use a Linux box if I need something more.

I'm glad that this post actually pointed me to the brand new release which
hopefully will provide a fix for a file permission bug that I recently hit.

UnxUtils is another similar package that I have successfully used in the past.
I think I jumped to Gow because I saw it here by the time I was getting back
to Windows.

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geofft
Apparently, since last time I looked, there's actually source code. It's a
tarball containing a collection of zip files of different layouts, with no
documentation of how to actually build things, some build trees, etc. Many of
the packages in that tarball are years out of date.

It's not a project that anyone else can reasonably use and build on -- it
would be easier just to replicate the work. (Which I would like to do,
incidentally.)

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zapman449
Personally, I think Gow is awesome. The few times that I need power unix
stuff, it's been just there, and it just works. That's the most important
thing.

For me, it's worth the 'price' of admission, just to get a usable instance of
'gfind', and avoiding the cognitive dissonance of typing 'ls' and not getting
useful info.

And it's not the PITA that is cygwin.

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fudged71
No ssh command?

~~~
zapman449
it includes the command lines for putty: pscp and psftp at least.

