Dear Thorsten, I have read your blog post "mksh/Win32" on Planet Debian and want to share my 2ยข but unfortunately your blog does not have a comments feature (I hope that does not mean that do do not want to receive comments on purpose, in which case I apologize for this mail).
Some time ago I was also very interested in getting some standard shell-accompanying Unix utilities to run on Win32. I also found unxutils.zip and used it for a while, but it felt bad to use software that is practically unmaintained and bit-rotting for years. The biggest advantage IMHO was that all binaries were statically linked against the compatibility library (called downhill from 1994!) and thus were instantly usable once copied onto the harddisk. Then I tried Cygwin as an alternative which is the exact counterpart. It is actively developed, features a full-blown POSIX compatibility layer in the form of a bunch of dynamic libraries. But it also ships a complete isolated environment clocking in with some GB of harddisk space and making it nearly impossible to rip out only the few parts that I found interesting. In the end I found MSYS and stick with it until today. It is an early fork of Cygwin by the people who develop MinGW and provides just enough of a shell and tools to run ./configure scripts. but to me this is often exactly what or even more than I need. It may be not as actively maintained as Cygwin (though there is an ongoing reimplementation based on current Cygwin called MSYS2), but the compatibility library is small and the whole system is wuite portable. It is even made available as a single tarball download by the MinGW-W65 people: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/mingw-w64/wiki/MSYS I'd suggest to give it a try and maybe bundle it with mksh/Win32 to provide a better and more complete shell environment. I am not sure if there are other alternatives (I believe I have once read about a busybox.exe for W32), but I have tried UnxUtils, Cywin and MSYS and decided to stay with the latter. Cheers, Fabian PS: Oh, wait, there is GnuWin32, which I also tried. But it turned me so utterly off that I had to manually download an entire installer for each command/group of commands that I merely forgot about it. Plus, there was a bunch of dynamic libraries and all .exe files had some hand-drawn 4-color icon files. Plus, some programs were even older versions than in MSYS. It makes me shiver, i wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
