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Re: GNU utilities for Win32
At 10:17 AM 8/4/97 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi.
>
>It's been said that a) windows keeps getting better through stealing
>ideas from unix, and that b) microsoft doesn't need to improve windows
>since all the people who hate it work so hard to do it themselves.
>
>Well, here's a collection of gnu utilities ported to win32 a friend
>pointed out to me. use an weep ;)
>
>http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32/
>
>Gaal
>
>
Yes, I know about the Cygnus collection and I even tried it here, at work.
Its utilities have some problems though:
1. They require a 3 MB DLL called cygwin.dll to be present in the
c:\windows\system directory.
2. They do not process wild character expressions themselves. Thus, if you
type "grep hello *.*" on a DOS box, it won't work because there is no such
file called "*.*". In UNIX the shell replaces wild characters expressions
with the filenames list, and that's what all the Cygnus utilities expect.
Therefore, they will only function properly from within the Win32 port of
Bash that is included there.
3. Most of them come as part of a very large archive.
>From those reasons, I prefer the DJGPP utilities. The DJGPP projects
maintains DOS versions of GNU programs that support Win95's long filenames.
(The DJGPP homepage is at http://www.delorie.com, and the distribution is
available for download at most Simtel.Net mirrors. )
They process wild-characters themselves, each is fully operational on its
own, and every GNU package can be downloaded separately as either binary or
source code. The fact that they are DOS-compatible may damage their
operation, because they cannot use Win32's multi-tasking features, but the
ones I found most useful do not depend on it.
Shlomi Fish
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