How do I get these Unix-like commands to work on my PC?
Sourceforge.net provides a package called UnxUtils of common GNU utilities to native Windows. It includes a lot of commonly used Unix-like commands and some text-processing programs such as GAWK. These commands and programs are to be used from command line window and are very useful for managing files, in our case, mainly ASCII data files.
To install this package to your machine, assuming that your machine is running Windows XP, you can simply follow the easy steps here.
Step 1: Follow the link and download the file UnxUtils.zip
Step 2: Extracting all the files from UnxUtils.zip to a new directory. For example, we will name the new directory d:gnu_unix.
Step 3: The last step is to set PATH for the utilities so they can be used from any directory. To add a path is to add the path to the folder where the programs are to the PATH variable. Following the linkage here by a single click at each step:
Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
Now we are the Environment Variables window, we will only need to pay attention to the lower window for System variables. Click on the Path Variable and then click on Edit… Add “d:gnu_unixusrlocalwbin;” to the path. Remember that each folder name is separated by semicolon “;”.
Click on OK(s) and it is finished.
Let’s fire up a command-line window and give it a try.
Start -> Run -> Type in “cmd”
Try some commands now.
