For this, we will be using CoreUtils. CoreUtils is available through Sourceforge
and is available for download here. If you look in here, there are a number of GNUWin32 packages available, the one we would be using is the CoreUtils package. CoreUtils is a collection of basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU
operating system. These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every OS. And when I talk about File utilities, they include chgrp, chmod, cp, dd, du, ln, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, touch, vdir among others. A sample of the text utilities include cat, cksum, cut, join, md5sum, shasum, sort, split etc. The shell root commands include echo, chroot, hostname, nice, pathchk, tty, who, whoami and yes su. So it is pretty much the whole nine yards here… The direct link for download of the CoreUtils package available through
SourceForge is available here.
Once installed, you will need to add the path to the utilities to your PATH environment variable. Follow the steps below to achieve this
1. Click on Start –> Run and enter
sysdm.cpl to bring up the system properties Dialog
2. Click on the Advanced tab –> Environment variables button
3. In the System Variables pane, scroll down to Path and then click on edit.
4. Under Edit System Variable, in the variable value, at the
end of the line , type the following including the semicolon which separates the individual elements in the path variable. ;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin
Congratulations !! You have now added the GNUWin directory to your path and Unix commands can now be executed directly from the command line and run natively on the Win32 command prompt without the need for any emulation layer as shown below using the example of dir vs ls
