HI Folks -
With many clients (most) going to Linux environments, I'd like to begint o develop one set of portable scripts I can use across all clients. Therefore, for my clients still on Windows, I'll need to use a tool to be able to do this.
What would you recommend to run shell on Windows? I'm seeing a lot of chatter on Winbash or Cygwin. Do both some with all shell binaries?
Thanks!
I use cygwin and find it quite a nice environment I find the Cygwin/X quite good in the windows environment.
As far as shell support goes it has:
bash, dash, fish, mksh, posh, tcsh, zsh
MirBSD Korn Shell is quite good for general ksh stuff, but it's missing a lot of the ksh93 features. In particular I miss Date Manipulation (eg printf "%T" now) and usually do ksh93 script testing/development on Linux.
Winbash has "just bash", nothing else. If you can write all your scripts with bash features alone, this is fine, because you have a simple environment and don't have to care about installation and package dependencies.
As soon as you need some external tools, you need to install for instance the utilities found in GnuWin32 (GnuWin32). Of course in this case, you can equally well install Cygwin in the first place.
In the past, Cygwin had the disadvantage that you could not do a portable installation and you needed local admin rights to install it. Recently this imporved a lot, so this is not really an argument anymore.