Shell with grep, sed, awk in windows [closed]

Question

Recently started work at a place that uses windows exclusively, and really could do with a simple shell that replicates bash functionality. MinGw and Cygwin seem overkill for what I need. Any suggestions gladly accepted. Thanks

Answer 1

You don't have to install all of Cygwin, since you can select individual packages.

Having said that, I still prefer to install the lot simply because I would rather have all the tools handy when I need them, rather than having to go and figure out which packages they're in. Even if you install the lot, no-ones forcing you to use all of them and, let's face it, disk space is hideously inexpensive nowadays.

If you want individual binaries for things like grep, sed and awk, you can also look into GnuWin32 - these are native executables that don't require the Cygwin DLL. You can just choose the executables you want from the package list and they'll be installed for you.

Answer 2

A shell's functionality usually uses external programs. You can download the windows versions of the tools you want: grep, awk, sed

You might also want to take a look into PowerShell - a windows shell that is actually good(much, much, much better than CMD), and has good interaction with the Windows environment.

Answer 3

Not exactly a shell, but I still use tools from the UnxUtils package, one of many tool sets which has ported little lightweight commands/apps/tools, ever so handy and useful in scripts.
Nowadays I am also exploring Powershell more and more, a shell certainly worth taking a look at. On Wikipedia's Powershell page one can even find a comparison of cmdlets with similar commands in Bash a.o., which you might find interesting.