Re: UnxUtils, Unix tools on Win32

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting "Leeuwesteijn,Joost" <address@hidden>:

> Hi *,
>
> This might be slightly off-topic but I think most people using GNU make &
> Win32 run into this at some point so that's why I post this here.
>
> Is anyone using UnxUtils (to get some highly required Unix-like features on
> Win32) in his/her build environment? I'm using it for its native
> gawk/grep/echo/sort/etc. See websites:
> http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ and
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils

I never liked this project very well.

> It is referenced quite a lot on the Net but the project doesn't seem to be
> very active anymore.
> Has anyone been able to compile these tools from source? I've downloaded the
> source from its CVS but no luck compiling it. Support doesn't seem to be
> available :-(
>
> What other Unix tools are people using on Win32? What I've found so far:
> - Cygwin

Cygwin is a full blown POSIX emulation so that you don't have to 
``port'' the UNIX source code to WINDOWS.  When you build using GCC it 
requires it cygwin1.dll runtime to support it.

> - MinGW

MinGW provides GCC and binutils that builds ``native'' binaries (i.e. 
requires MSVCRT.DLL) and doesn't require a special dll.  Also provides 
freely distributable msvcrt and w32api headers and import libraries.  
MinGW has MSYS (Minimal SYStem) which contains a modified version of 
Cygwin but its purpose is to provide a shell environment for the 
MINGW32 target.  The modifications removed all registry fingerprint, 
auto conversion of pathing from POSIX to Windows, and reduced 
/cygdrive/c to just /c.  The shell provided is bash but name sh for 
POSIX compliance.  MSYS uses MinGW gcc so there is no dependency on any 
special runtime dll in your built code.

> - GnuWin32

Many unixy tools ported to native MSVCRT can be found here.  If MinGW 
doesn't provide it, you should use it from here.

> Any other (free, open source) tools I should know about?

Too many to list here.

> I put GNU make and it's source into our archive, compiled it using Visual C
> 6. No problem. I was hoping to do the same with other GNU tools but no luck
> so far.

You should be able to take make-3.81 source and build it in MSYS using 
./configure --prefix=/mingw && make.

Earnie Boyd

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