Searching for UNIX utilities in Windows

UNIX utilities like wc, ps, top, awk, xargs, grep, find are proven to be handy for many data crunching purposes. It helps a lot to manipulate the text information; those who are used to UNIX/Linux environments may feel bad when they turn to windows. Even in my case, I used the telnet sessions to connect over remote UNIX machine, and I am very much used to these utilities to find and gather data. But when I want to do the same work in my windows desktop, I feel helpless.

Those who want to try the shell environment in their windows machine can try the Cygwin. Cygwin is powerful and very raw to handle. Only an UNIX user will be very comfortable with it. In the case you were just looking for the utilities (like ls, grep, top,awk, also little shell support), you can go for UnixUtils project from open source community Source Forge. This provides excellent support for general utilities.

Also try out Windows SFU (Services For UNIX) , the first place winner in Linux annual conference, from Microsoft. Moreover it’s free now! It provides excellent support for shell utilities, also for System management tools like NFS, telnet client/server.

Example:
The following command will examine all Java files located in the directory src and print the 10 files with the highest number of occurrences of a method call to substring:

find src -name ’*.java’ -print |
xargs fgrep -c .substring |
sort -t: -rn -k2 |
head -10

Also try tools from OutWit  [Outwit is a suite of tools based on the Unix tool design principles allowing the processing of Windows application data with sophisticated data manipulation pipelines. The outwit tools offer access to the Windows clipboard, the registry, the event log, relational databases, document properties, and shell links.]

I like the winclip tool, because in command prompt I can use a command like

• winclip –p | grep ‘Spring’ | cut –d –f2

And I can change the clipboard content, and re-run the command simply, in the shell