The January 2004 Power Tools column Cross-Platform Command Lines presented ways to use the Linux- like features of Microsoft’s shell CMD. However, that shell still requires some thought; you can’t just type a Linux command and expect it to work just as it would in, say, bash.
Windows command-line utilities like FIND.EXE have evolved since the days of DOS, and some of them are quite handy. Of course, Windows also comes with graphical utilities like Windows Explorer, and there are thousands of third-party graphical tools for Windows that enhance the experience and increase the utility of the desktop. Yet in a lot of cases, those Windows applications can’t match the power of the time-tested (and time-improved) GNU shells and utilities.
The Cygwin package (http://www.cygwin.com/) is a Linux-like environment for Microsoft Windows that includes those standard shells and utilities. In this third (and last) article of a series about Cygwin, let’s look at some of the things that can be a struggle with standard Windows tools, but are easy to do with Cygwin utilities. We’ll also see how to use Cygwin scripts and utilities from Windows shortcuts and menus.
Running Shell Scripts From Outside Cygwin
Because the Linux shells have many more features than the Windows CMD interpreter, you may want to run shell scripts instead of Windows batch files.
To run a shell script from outside of a Cygwin shell — such…
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