Microsoft’s shell, CMD, is essentially the original MS-DOS shell with some extensions that make it more usable. (The January 2004 “Power Tools” column, “Cross-Platform Command-Lines,” tells more.) As you saw last month, though, installing the freely-available Cygwin package on your Windows system gives you a much more powerful command-line. In fact, Cygwin comes with a number of major Linux shells — if you install them, that is. Here’s a list of available shells, generated from within Cygwin:
$ cd /bin; ls *sh.exe ash.exe ksh.exe tclsh.exe autossh.exe pdksh.exe tcsh.exe bash.exe sh.exe wish.exe csh.exe ssh.exe zsh.exe
These shells are virtually identical to the ones on your Linux system.
Let’s look at some of their features and settings that will help you get more work done more quickly (and with more fun) on a Windows system. We’ll also see a script for finding programs by entering part of their name. (A lot of this is also useful under Linux.)
Handling File Types
Unix and Linux generally don’t require filename extensions (filenames ending with a dot and three or four characters that tell the file type). For instance, text filenames don’t need to end with .txt. (The January 2005 “Power Tools” column, “It’s (Not) Magic,” has details.)
Under Cygwin, it’s easy to use Linux-type filenames without extensions: simply create and use files as you normally would on your Linux box. For example, if you create a shell script in a file named foo,…
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