4 ms·

so what's the advantage over cygwin? is this intended for people with really small disks?

rwallace 14y ago
Cygwin goes to heroic lengths to try to turn Windows into Unix; from what I've heard, it even splices a DLL into every process on the machine; if you want a less intrusive solution that just gives you a Unix utilities under Windows, Gow looks good.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  any chance of a reference for "splices a DLL into every process on the machine"?
  - rwallace 14y ago
    Afraid not, I forget where I heard it. I ran a Google search just now, though, and found a few pages such as http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 which suggest Cygwin is innocent of such behavior and what's really going on is Cygwin needs a fixed DLL address (only for programs linked against it) and this is not compatible with some of the more intrusive antivirus programs that do inject a DLL into every process.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Cygwin processes run through a shared DLL, of which one significant consequence is that all Cygwin processes on a machine apparently share some memory/process segments, making crypto and SSH commands less secure than they might be elsewhere. That said, the heroic efforts to turn Windows into Unix, when on the rare occasion I find myself stuck in a Windows instance, are very highly appreciated. At one point in my life, I was taking advantage of this to run X on my Linux box (cleaner and a few additional features that Windows didn't offer), with tunneled SSH to Windows to run, among other things, some Windows-based applications (which retained enough commandline features to be usable in this fashion) in an environment which almost fully resembled Unix. It helped markedly for both productivity and sanity.
amcintyre 14y ago
Gow appears to automatically make all those Unix utilities available right inside the normal Windows command line without having to manually kludge them in there like you do in Cygwin. I usually just find myself missing the kinds of utilities that are included in Gow, so I don't really need the entire Cygwin universe available. The fact that I can download and have it installed in 15 seconds and get 99% of what I would like added to Windows will make me choose it by default when I have to work on Windows. Adding the "Command line here" context menu item is nice, too (although that's available by Ctrl+right-click in at least Windows 7 anyway).
- AutoCorrect 14y ago
  Shift + right-click, not Ctrl.

Cygwin goes to heroic lengths to try to turn Windows into Unix; from what I've heard, it even splices a DLL into every process on the machine; if you want a less intrusive solution that just gives you a Unix utilities under Windows, Gow looks good.

andrewcooke 14y ago
any chance of a reference for "splices a DLL into every process on the machine"?
- rwallace 14y ago
  Afraid not, I forget where I heard it. I ran a Google search just now, though, and found a few pages such as http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 which suggest Cygwin is innocent of such behavior and what's really going on is Cygwin needs a fixed DLL address (only for programs linked against it) and this is not compatible with some of the more intrusive antivirus programs that do inject a DLL into every process.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Cygwin processes run through a shared DLL, of which one significant consequence is that all Cygwin processes on a machine apparently share some memory/process segments, making crypto and SSH commands less secure than they might be elsewhere. That said, the heroic efforts to turn Windows into Unix, when on the rare occasion I find myself stuck in a Windows instance, are very highly appreciated. At one point in my life, I was taking advantage of this to run X on my Linux box (cleaner and a few additional features that Windows didn't offer), with tunneled SSH to Windows to run, among other things, some Windows-based applications (which retained enough commandline features to be usable in this fashion) in an environment which almost fully resembled Unix. It helped markedly for both productivity and sanity.

amcintyre 14y ago

Gow appears to automatically make all those Unix utilities available right inside the normal Windows command line without having to manually kludge them in there like you do in Cygwin. I usually just find myself missing the kinds of utilities that are included in Gow, so I don't really need the entire Cygwin universe available. The fact that I can download and have it installed in 15 seconds and get 99% of what I would like added to Windows will make me choose it by default when I have to work on Windows. Adding the "Command line here" context menu item is nice, too (although that's available by Ctrl+right-click in at least Windows 7 anyway).

AutoCorrect 14y ago
Shift + right-click, not Ctrl.