Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow

by joshbaptiste • 14 years ago

40 18 14 years ago

github.com

fudged71• 14 years ago

No ssh command?

zapman4493• 14 years ago

it includes the command lines for putty: pscp and psftp at least.

runjake• 14 years ago

This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months.

Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves.

It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a project seriously when it's written in VBScript because so many of its constructs are shoddy.

But again, those last two paragraphs are meant as advice for living projects, which this one is not.

mkl• 14 years ago

Plus it's been submitted multiple times in the last few months already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3312009, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085022

kayoone• 14 years ago

0.6.0 seems to have been released in the last 24 hours. You are probably right with the rest though

dmboyd• 14 years ago

Giving the guy a break, it does look like he doesn't "get" github, as it hosts the sources(not in an easily buildable format) as a binary download. and the content of the repo is just random batch files.

And, regarding batch files, if it gets the job done (i.e. M4 autoconf scripts). What would powershell give you?

bmatzelle• 14 years ago

I am the author of Gow.

> This is a junk submission. Where to start?

I've never submitted Gow to Hacker News but it does seem to pop up every once and a while and it gets the project a few hits.

This is a project I work on in my free time (and I get paid very well hourly so it's expensive to me) and if it weren't for programmers like me you wouldn't be able to do half the things you can do on your computer, so unless you've spent thousands of hours coding for free then please stop spreading the hate.

> This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months.

Please do your research. I just made a big release yesterday so the user that posted this wasn't just spamming HN.

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/change_log

> Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity

I wrote that script 10 years ago and it works with every version of Windows from Windows 2000 on. I made Gow so I could use Unix utilities on all versions of Windows. If I wrote it in PowerShell then it would force all users to either use a new version of Windows or download the PowerShell installer for zero added benefit. The script just adds Gow\bin to the PATH. Gow certainly doesn't need PowerShell for that.

michaelcampbell• 14 years ago

> It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago.

Except Powershell uses a wholly different paradigm, won't run people's favorite shell scripts they've carried around with them for decades, and makes people's ingrained years of experience and learning largely moot. That doesn't sound like much of a "win" to me.

Gow, mingw, cygwin solves a very large need for very many people, for which Powershell is 100% inadequate.

nilsimsa• 14 years ago

I've been using UnxUtils as a lightweight alternative for a while now. Its available on sourceforge.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

The bigger purpose of cygwin is to be able to compile your unix c/c++ to run on Windows. The shell utils is a small part of it, and better covered by things like UnxUtils and the various sets of binaries of the actual unix shell utils that people have packaged already.

geofft• 14 years ago

Apparently, since last time I looked, there's actually source code. It's a tarball containing a collection of zip files of different layouts, with no documentation of how to actually build things, some build trees, etc. Many of the packages in that tarball are years out of date.

It's not a project that anyone else can reasonably use and build on -- it would be easier just to replicate the work. (Which I would like to do, incidentally.)

wazoox• 14 years ago

No, for many years the lightweight alternative has been mingw. http://www.mingw.org/

markokocic• 14 years ago

And it works pretty well. After installing mingw-get, it is not anymore a hassle to keep it up to date.

zapman4493• 14 years ago

GOW seems to be more focused on a userland environment, whereas mingw is focused on enabling developers to link against unix libraries in a windows environment. Sure there's msggrep, and msgfilter as userland in mingw, but GOW gives you direct access to 'ls', 'gfind', 'grep', etc, and doesn't care a fig about giving access to libz.

jamesu• 14 years ago

My only problem with Cygwin is that installing and updating packages is a pain since you need to use the setup program. Apart from that it works great for what I use it for - a unixy shell with ports of a few tools I like using.

beagle3• 14 years ago

apt-cyg makes that much less painful:

http://code.google.com/p/apt-cyg/

asual• 14 years ago

I have been using this package for months and I'm happy with it. My setup includes console2 + mingw (git for windows) + gow and it meets my expectations. I don't care if it's written in VBScript as long as it works. I have OSX at home and I can always use a Linux box if I need something more.

I'm glad that this post actually pointed me to the brand new release which hopefully will provide a fix for a file permission bug that I recently hit.

UnxUtils is another similar package that I have successfully used in the past. I think I jumped to Gow because I saw it here by the time I was getting back to Windows.

zapman4493• 14 years ago

Personally, I think Gow is awesome. The few times that I need power unix stuff, it's been just there, and it just works. That's the most important thing.

For me, it's worth the 'price' of admission, just to get a usable instance of 'gfind', and avoiding the cognitive dissonance of typing 'ls' and not getting useful info.

And it's not the PITA that is cygwin.

Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

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