====== Engineering Workbench ======

Unix-like working environments for M$-Windows.

  * [[soft:engineering:Cygwin]] -- a collection of tools which provide a Linux look and feel environment for Windows.
  * [[MinGW]] -- Minimalist GNU for Windows 
  * [[Gow (Gnu On Windows)]] -- The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
  * [[http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/|UnxUtils]] -- GNU utilities for Win32 <wrap alert>obsolete</wrap>

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===== UnxUtils =====

A bunch of GNU utilities ported to native Win32 (i.e. the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime library msvcrt.dll) provided as ZIP-archive.

  * <wrap download>[[http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/|UnxUtils]]</wrap> -- GNU utilities for Win32.

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<wrap safety>pro:</wrap>
  * Probably the most frugal solution.
  * Has //find//, //gawk//, //make//.
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<wrap danger>cons:</wrap>
  * No installer. Lack of concept where to install the tools on the Windows box (in c:\, c:\programms or elsewhere). This may be an issue for shell scripts that rely on a dedicated environment (i.e. search path, config files, etc...) and shall be provided to a team or workgroup where each user is free to install the tools in one's sole discretion.
  * No Explorer integration (i.e. concept on how the tools shall be called or found)
  * Provide broken zsh shell (e.g. crashes on simple commands like ls or env, escape sequences (i.e. colors) ignored, autoload feature not available or broken, etc.).
  * Obsolete (last updated in 2003).
<wrap important>Advanced users may be warned. I stumbled on some flaws with the advanced file redirection features of awk or Unix/Windows line endings issues in sed.</wrap> FIXME
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