I am a newbie to cygwin/msys2 and appreciate all the effort that goes into
providing such elaborate facilities and all for free.
I cannot believe that somebody has not asked a similar question but after a
few hours of looking, I have not found it
in a form I recognised hence this email.
If I missed finding the right archived posts, please re-direct me and accept
my apologies for wasting your inbox space.
I simply want to supplement Windows with the shells and utilities common to
Unix/Linux for the purpose of personal
productivity scripting.
I am not trying to build packages.
I am not trying to compile low level software.
I do not need to port scripts to Linux or some other POSIX environment.
I just want to use bash/ksh/sh/any-sh-is-better-than-CMD and all the normal
unix utilities - nawk, sed, grep, strings, sort etc.
to do day-to-day stuff.
Ideally I would like to use normal windows paths. e.g. (as a completely
artificial example)
find d:/mystuff -name "zot*.txt" -print -exec diff {} 'c:\temp\my
original zot.txt' \; > foo
One reason for being able to use windows-syntax for paths is copying the
path to a file from an explorer window into a command
being composed.
Ideally I would like to be able to invoke all the unix tools from either a
sh or CMD.
Ideally I would like to be able to invoke Windows utilities from whichever
sh with minimal hoop-jumping to pass paths parameters. E.g.
find d:/stuff -size +5 | while read Thing ; do zippittydoodah "$(cygpath
-d \"$Thing\")" ; done
where zippittydoodah utility is from a Windows product and expects native
path syntax.
Ideally I would like the environment to respect normal Windows facilities
and conventions e.g. PATHEXT for distinguishing executables
rather than or in addition to permission bits. (I have been subscribed to
the cygwin mailing list for a few months to see what are
hot issues and after cygwin's long history, zot vs zot.exe remains a
recurring contentious topic. My understanding is that, when using cygwin,
if zippittydodah is an exe in the example above, I get away with not putting
.exe but if it were a CMD, I would need to fully specify the
file name.)
I am getting the impression that cygwin may be overkill and msys2 has
advantages for my objectives (e.g. default noacl on automounts).
Both emphasize a developer (i.e. compile and package orientation) audience
and I am left wondering if non-development riff-raff
would be better off with some other simpler option.
Thank you very much for any insights.
By the way, I went through the MSYS2 Wiki, all the topics in the general
discussion forum, and mailing lists (searching for various phrases).
If somebody can briefly outline the options, issues, and trade-offs, it
might be a good article for the wiki or a general discussion topic.
Michel LaBarre
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