 | By Ryan Russell I install several free utilities on my Windows machines to make quick work of standard network and maintenance tasks. Whether you compute strictly with Windows or with a mix of Windows and Unix systems, as I do, you’re likely to find at least one of these programs very useful. |
A bevy of Unix command-line tools for Windows
The granddaddy of all system tools is cygwin, which provides a Unix-like command-line shell for Windows. Actually, that simple description does the program a disservice, because after installing cygwin, you can choose from among many different Unix shells. In fact, the program is really a compatibility layer for Unix source code that’s compiled to run on Windows.
Cygwin gives you access to a ton of Unix tools, including security utilities, programming languages, and text processors. If you’re comfortable using a Unix command prompt, you’ll be right at home in cygwin. Among my favorite cygwin programs are OpenSSH, find, sed, and rsync.
What cygwin is not is small and compact. The program is much like an entire operating system, requiring as much as a few hundred megabytes of hard-disk space, depending on how many of its tools you choose to install.
Also, there are dependencies to worry about in cygwin and updates to manage. I often have to reinstall the specific utilities I want because I initially missed the app in cygwin’s cryptic installer interface. That’s why I usually install cygwin only on my primary Windows machines.
A fast, lightweight Secure Shell client
Way back when, in the DOS days, I forced myself to learn how to use DOS utilities, such as the Edlin line editor, because I knew they would be available on any system. At the time, I was working on hundreds of different PCs and knew only that DOS itself was certain to be installed.
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