📅 2010-Aug-03 ⬩ ✍️ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ 🏷️ cygwin, gnuwin32 ⬩ 📚 Archive
After many years of using Cygwin, I am saying a final goodbye to it thanks to GnuWin32. Much like Cygwin, GnuWin32 is also a port of common Linux command-line tools to Windows. However, it does not have any of the icky problems of Cygwin. There are no DLL problems (like with cygwin.dll), no special command windows, or directory naming conventions.
The structure of GnuWin32 is very simple. Most of the command-line tools are provided individually as easy-to-install setup packages. You can download and install only the packages you need. For example, when you feel the need for grep, just download the grep package.
When there are a lot of small tools that are related, they are provided as a single package. For example, ls is in coreutils package.
Do remember to add the bin directory of GnuWin32 to the %PATH% environment variable. Typically this is C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin This is where all GnuWin32 packages put their binaries.